REL 118
Emerson's American Religion and Ethics Fall 2024
Division II

Whether it is cause for veneration or blame, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-1882] have significantly shaped American values, ideals, and attitudes. Emerson has inspired rebels against tradition, revelers in nature, and explorers of the soul. But his writing has also been derided as ethereal, individualistic, and high-minded. This course is an immersion in the essays and poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While we will nod occasionally toward Emerson’s historical context, our task will not be to historicize him. We will respond directly to Emerson as humanistic scholars and as human beings who are addressed by his writing. We will investigate critically how he makes arguments, how he uses language, the concepts he develops, his sense of what has gravity and what is frivolous, the anxieties and desires that lie beneath the surface of his texts, what he admires, what he disdains. But we will also respond to his ideas as living invitations to clarify our own thinking. We will critique, but also champion or build with his ideas of genius, the over-soul, the self, fate, reason, sincerity, character, beauty, America, religion, experience, creativity, and more. Students will be asked to develop their own thinking about these ideas and show how their thinking can work with or against Emerson’s. This course is an opportunity to cultivate a relationship of intellectual intimacy with a profound and expansive human consciousness, reflect critically on yourself and on Emerson in this relationship, and exercise key capacities necessary for the humanistic study of religion and ethics: analytical reasoning, critical introspection, interpretative judgment, and creative expression.