CCWV.LIFE Support This Site

Emerson's Divinity School Address

1838 · Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States)

Ralph Waldo Emerson tells Harvard's graduating divinity students in 1838 to cast out conformity and preach from their own souls. The address breaks him with the Unitarian establishment and opens the American lineage of personal spirituality outside the churches.

Tagged: Secular and Non-Theistic Spiritual But Not Religious

The Event

Date
1838 (exact)
Era
The Enlightenment Settlement; Standard periodization of secular and non-religious history
Location
Cambridge, Massachusetts; today United States
Traditions
Secular
Streams
Spiritual But Not Religious
Key figures
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Primary Sources

  • The tradition's own record of the event.

Secondary Sources

  • Gottlieb, Anthony. The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy. New York: Liveright, 2016.
  • Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.
  • Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
  • Zuckerman, Phil, ed. Atheism and Secularity. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.

Provenance: HIST-1312; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-28.

Related on This Site

No image; the post explains why Art Entry AI-Generated Religious Art Image generators now produce Christs, Buddhas, and temple scenes on demand. The traditions are answering; some with welcome, some with prohibitions that reach the new medium directly. This page shows no generated image, because any single example would misrepresent the argument. Visitors crossing the British Museum's Great Court beneath its tessellated glass roof, facing the classical stone façade of the Reading Room. Art Tradition Non-Theistic and Secular Art without transcendence: humanist meaning-making, museums as secular temples, and protest art. Inside Doris Salcedo's Fragmentos memorial in Bogotá: a glass-walled corridor whose floor is made of her textured metal plates cast from melted-down weapons, with preserved ruins visible through the glass. Artist Doris Salcedo The Colombian sculptor of political violence's traces; her Fragmentos floor in Bogotá is a counter-monument hammered from surrendered weapons by women victims of the conflict. Käthe Kollwitz's bronze Pietà, Mother with her Dead Son, in Berlin's Neue Wache: a shrouded seated mother bowing over the body of her son stretched across her lap. Artist Käthe Kollwitz The German artist of grief: her Pietà, enlarged in Berlin's Neue Wache, is Germany's central memorial to the victims of war; a mother holding her dead son, made by a mother who lost hers. Illustration for James's Varieties of Religious Experience History Event James's Varieties of Religious Experience 1902 Illustration for Rise of the 'Nones' History Event Rise of the 'Nones' 2010s-present Illustration for Theosophical Society founded History Event Theosophical Society founded 1875 A lone person sits in lotus position on a wooden jetty over Lake Titicaca, silhouetted against the low sun on the water. World View Spiritual But Not Religious Spiritual But Not Religious is the self-description of those who keep the sacred and leave the institution: personal practice, borrowed wisdom, and experience over doctrine, without membership, creed, or clergy.