It was on this day in 1838 that Ralph Waldo Emerson, who six years before had resigned as minister of the Second Church (Unitarian), was invited to speak to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School. The now famous or infamous, your choice, Divinity School Address, as Coleen Walsh writing in the Harvard Gazette notes, “represented a turning point for Unitarianism, beginning its transformation from a liberal form of Christianity to a type of religious liberalism independent of specific historic traditions.” It set off a firestorm of protest, and then of defense. Certainly the reverberations have not yet stilled. This was a singular moment in our American religious history, and could be said to be as momentous as when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to that door. That important.
The whole text of the Address is available here.
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