Classroom Activities

1. Emerson lived for most of his life in Concord, Massachusetts. Part of his childhood was spent at the “Old Manse,” a house set just off the Concord River and the Old North Bridge, where the Revolutionary War began. His grandparents watched the fighting commence from their rear sitting room, the same room in which Emerson would later write his first book, What do you make of a man with that kind of lineage breaking so sharply with his religious-intellectual tradition? Does his connection to the past—and to the Revolution—make him any more or less likely to go his own way?
2. After spending years in Boston, with a few other stops and a trip abroad, Emerson returned to a Concord that was also home to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, the Alcotts, and many distinguished guests. How influential is the setting that great thinkers, writers, and speakers inhabit? Do you think these people emerged from this particular town because it was special in some way? Or did the coincidence of their simultaneous residence make the town special? Would they have been just as famous had they come up separately, and elsewhere?
3. Emerson’s life was full of tragedy. His father died when he was just a boy. He suffered from tuberculosis at several stages, and watched the disease kill his young wife at the age of nineteen. He would later lose two brothers and his firstborn son to illnesses as well. Do you think that his views on life, nature, God, etc. were influenced by his close proximity to death? In what ways might your own views be shaped by such a precarious world?
4. Emerson’s views were also shaped by the year he spent traveling in Europe. In what ways were Emerson’s horizons broadened by his time in Italy, France, and England? Has your worldview ever been expanded by a trip abroad?
5. Typically, when invited to give a commencement address, a speaker will try to abide by the conventions of such a speech. This means keeping the remarks upbeat, inspirational, motivating, etc., while offering praise to the institution and the value of its educational mission. Instead, Emerson decided to criticize the faith, the ministers, the faculty, and the entire Unitarian enterprise on which the Harvard Divinity School was founded. Do you think he violated these norms intentionally, to cause a stir? Was he playing the instigator? Was he simply speaking truth to power in the form of a bunch of arrogant, complacent, and dusty clergymen?
6. What are the elements of Emerson’s rhetorical situation? What circumstances prompted the speech? To whom was it delivered? In what ways was it constrained? Do you think he delivered a fitting response to the exigency as he saw it?
7. How would you assess the quality of Emerson’s argument? What are his two primary contentions? Do you find them persuasive?
8. Emerson’s definitive belief may have been that God remains active in the world, speaking to individuals through their interior hearts and minds, inspiring them by way of intuition. This is an empowering thought, but critics would suggest that it may also deliver a sense of empowerment to people who mishear the voice of God in their own human thoughts. What do you think of this concern?
9. What do you think about the tone in which the speech is composed and delivered? One common complaint about Emerson’s speaking and writing was that it was always delivered in this airy, ephemeral, abstract sort of language that normal people found difficult to follow. Those who appreciate Emerson tend to see this as his literary artistry, while his critics see his head in the clouds. They would prefer a more down-to-earth mode of address. What do you think?
10. The 1830s marked the pinnacle of Emerson’s religious After 1840 he devoted himself to a much wider diversity of subjects and interests. Having read up a bit on his biography and considered his Address, how would you characterize his faith commitment? Does he seem to have grown and changed organically as he thought deeply on religious matters? Does the Address mark his rejection of faith in favor of something different? Do you think he would have skipped the ministry entirely if there had been another way to pay the bills? What does the evidence suggest?
11. What are your thoughts on the “Miracles Controversy” to which the Divinity School Address contributed? What do the various speakers, writers, and arguments from that controversy tell us about the religious climate in and around Boston during the 1830s and 40s? In what ways was it similar or different from the religious and political controversies we witness today?

Student Research

1. Use Communication Source to search relevant terms like “Ralph Waldo Emerson” or “Divinity School Address” and see what kinds of responses you get. Have communication scholars written much on these topics? If so, can you see how each successive essay builds on or responds to the work that came before? If not, try broadening your terms or parameters. In either case, do you see how a young scholar might work to close the existing gaps in the literature?
2. Emerson is an interesting rhetorical figure because he did so much writing for He wrote essays that he read at lyceum events and then published in books. Should we think of him primarily as a writer? Or a speaker? Or both? See how many academic articles you can find on Emerson’s writing. Then do the same for those that focus on his speaking. Which track have most scholars taken so far? And why?
3. The Divinity School Address was the second in a trio of sermons that are considered canonical in the literature of American Unitarianism. The other two are William Ellery Channing’s “Unitarian Christianity” (1819) and Theodore Parker’s “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841). All three have now been examined in VOD Read these other speeches and try to identify common threads running through them all. Together, what do they tell us about the trajectory of the tradition at the time?
4. Emerson is remembered as a leader—perhaps the leader—of the “Transcendentalist” circle in and around Concord throughout the middle of the nineteenth century. What have scholars written about Transcendentalism? What does the term mean, and what did its adherents believe? To what extent were they uniform or heterodox in their commitments? What issues did they embrace? And how was Emerson similar or different from the others in these matters?
5. Search also for articles on American “Free Thought” or “Freethinkers.” Given Unitarian and Transcendentalist commitments to free inquiry, did these movements open any doors for, or establish any connections to the agnostics and atheists of the latter nineteenth century? If not, or if so, does that serve to confirm or disconfirm the accusations made against Channing, Emerson, and Parker?
6. Take a look at the VOD unit on Harry Emerson Fosdick. In what ways were Emerson’s concerns still applicable eight decades later? Had anything been resolved? Were the core contentions around orthodoxy and free inquiry still in play? How might Channing, Emerson, Parker, and Fosdick be read together to draw conclusions about the durability of these problems in American religiosity?
7. Finally, search for scholarly articles or books on some of these core themes. What other major American religious figures engaged these issues between 1800 and the present? What does the trajectory look like over these years? How might you plan a longitudinal study that identifies and examines the state of the discourse over time?

Citizenship Resources

1. The controversy over Emerson’s address demonstrates that religious belief can be either intensely unifying or fiercely divisive. In your view, what role should religion play in public life? Given its potential to make people more generous, compassionate, and humble, as well its potential to make them more exclusive, judgmental, and critical, how should religion be contained, managed, or directed in the public square? And does it even lend itself to those guardrails?
2. To what extent, if any, should religious beliefs be acknowledged or considered in public policy and lawmaking? Does religion reveal eternal truths or values that must be honored in our laws, norms, and customs? Does God speak to and through each of us? Is there a way to know which human pronouncements are divine and which merely human? Should these questions matter to non-religious people?
3. Thomas Jefferson once referred to a “wall of separation” between church and state, suggesting that these institutions operate in separate spheres. And yet, there are a lot of opportunities for overlap and collision. In the mid-nineteenth century, Unitarian and Transcendentalist figures became active in a host of reform movements, including temperance, woman’s rights, and anti-slavery. Emerson dabbled in—and was critical of—several of these in different ways and at different times in his life. How do you think about the relationship between religious belief and political participation? To what extent are they complementary, and to what extent not?
4. Though America is committed to freedom and liberty above all other values, these often run afoul of definitional boundaries. For example, Emerson believed that he could be a Christian without believing in the divinity of Christ or the historic infallibility of the Bible. For many of his critics, such beliefs were disqualifying. How do you weigh the freedom to think or believe whatever you find persuasive against the desire to be included in groups with which you identify? Can you be a Christian agnostic, for example? Or an American communist?
5. Finally, given how contentious these matters of belief and identity always are, what role is left for persuasion? Where politics and religion are concerned, is it possible to change minds or influence thought? Or have we insulated ourselves against arguments, evidences, and appeals that challenge our core beliefs, values, and identities?