Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul

A study of the spiritual practices developed by the nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist movement and a case for their necessity today. “The stern old faiths have all pulverized,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1860. “‘Tis a whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in search of religions.” Often seen as a mainspring of the nineteenth-century literary tradition and the preserve of New England intellectuals in retreat from society, American Transcendentalism is more accurately described