A dramatic retelling of the story of the Transcendentalists, revealing them not as isolated authors but as a community of social activists who shaped progressive American values.
Conflagration illuminates the connections between key members of the Transcendentalist circle--including James Freeman Clarke, Elizabeth Peabody, Caroline Healey Dall, Elizabeth Stanton, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller--who created a community dedicated to radical social activism. These authors and activists laid the groundwork for democratic and progressive religion in America.
In the tumultuous decades before and immediately after the Civil War, the Transcendentalists changed nineteenth-century America, leading what Theodore Parker called "a Second American Revolution." They instigated lasting change in American society, not only through their literary achievements but also through their activism: transcendentalists fought for the abolition of slavery, democratically governed churches, equal rights for women, and against the dehumanizing effects of brutal economic competition and growing social inequality.
The Transcendentalists' passion for social equality stemmed from their belief in spiritual friendship--transcending differences in social situation, gender, class, theology, and race. Together, their fight for justice changed the American sociopolitical landscape. They understood that none of us can ever fulfill our own moral and spiritual potential unless we care about the full spiritual and moral flourishing of others.
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Transcendentalism was more than Concord! While Thoreau meditated at Walden and Emerson lectured at the lyceum, their spiritual friends fought slavery, created communes, empowered women, and imagined new forms of religious community. The spiritual friendships forged in the early gatherings of the Transcendentalist Club allowed the movement to ripple outward, transforming their own time and our own. Now John Buehrens has told many forgotten Transcendentalist stories in one of the most wide-ranging histories of the movement ever written. Buehrens places Boston’s Church of the Disciples and its pastor, James Freeman Clarke, at the center of his multifaceted story. These ‘Disciples,’ among the women’s rights champion Julia Ward Howe and the Republican politician John Andrew, built bridges between Christian liturgy and post-Christian mysticism, between armed resistance to slavery and the political establishment, and between Boston and the nation. Their legacy challenges us to transform both our understanding of Transcendentalism and our own lives.
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Dan McKanan, author of Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition