Thursday June 26, 2003

"Emerson and the Perennial Philosophy"

Presentation by

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., PhD

Author of "Emerson: The Mind On Fire"

This year we celebrate the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth. A descendent of ministers and once a Unitarian minister himself, Emerson shook the foundation of established religion. When he delivered his celebrated address at the Harvard Divinity School and admonished the graduates to "go alone; to refuse the good models, and dare to love God without mediator or veil," it was his last "face-off" with organized religion. Even though he chose to follow his own self-reliant path, Emerson remained deeply religious throughout his life, with a thoroughly spiritual view of human life and the world. Moreover, during his lifetime and in the years since his death in 1882 he has exerted a profound influence on liberal theology and enriched the spiritual lives of generations of Unitarian Universalists.

Robert D. Richardson, Jr. currently lives in North Carolina, having taught at the University of Denver and Wesleyan University. He is a Unitarian Universalist with longstanding ties to our movement and the son of a Unitarian Universalist minister who served in Concord, MA. He is author of the prize-winning biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, which has been hailed as "the definitive biography" and the "most credible portrait of a . . .fully human Emerson." He has also written Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, winner of the Melcher Book Award, and Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance. He is currently working on a biography of William James.

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