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The conclusion argues that religions provide templates for thinking that endure long after their immediate relevance to a society has faded. An apocalyptic worldview in which the end of time is imminent remains in secular culture drained of meaning—the final days when the saved will be separated from the damned exists uncomfortably alongside multiculturalism and globalization. The inclusive nature of Platonic thinking, the ascent of a ladder of knowledge, love, or mysticism still has echoes in popular culture, where Spiritualism ultimately succeeded as an ethical enterprise.

Buddhism has created a place for itself in the modern ecology of ideas and practices by placing itself within and between three key discourses of modernity: those of scientific naturalism, Romanticism and Transcendentalism, and Christianity. Specifically, it aligned itself with scientific rationalism over against conservative, missionary forms of Christianity, while borrowing from Christianity’s more liberal and mystical elements. Nevertheless, it has also been critical of positivistic and scientistic modes of rationalism, and in articulating this critique it has drawn on the Romantic-Transcendentalist cosmology and their stress on the value of interior experience. This chapter shows how foundational Buddhist modernists like Soen Shaku and Dwight Goddard re-configured Buddhist concepts in the languages of rationalism, Romanticism, and Christianity, carving out a space for Buddhism in the tensions between these discourses.

This chapter investigates the articulation of Buddhism in terms of Romanticism and Transcendentalism by examining how Buddhism has come to be conceived as having a special link to art and creativity. D. T. Suzuki, a key figure in this conception, amalgamated German idealist and American Transcendentalist cosmological concepts with Buddhist ones and presented the Japanese poets, Zen monks, and samurai warriors as deeply and religiously attentive to nature in ways similar to the English Romantics and American Transcendentalists. His conception of spiritual freedom as a spontaneous, emancipatory consciousness that transcends rational intellect and social convention drew heavily on these figures. The idea caught on with other influential figures like Lama Govinda and Sangharakshita and has inspired a plethora of popular books, as well as programs in meditation and creativity in monasteries and universities.

Romanticism brings back the twinned concepts of preexistence and theosis. The revival of Plato (under Thomas Taylor's influence) sparks revival of interest in preexistence especially. William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge are only the most prominent names among the Romantics, as is Alfred, Lord Tennyson among the Victorians, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among the Transcendentalists, to espouse preexistence.

This chapter traces the intellectual history of the canon among liberal Christians of the nineteenth century. Beginning with Hicksite Quakers, it moves through William Ellery Channing's Unitarianism, the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, the transition from Transcendentalism to Catholicism of Orestes Brownson, and finally the liberal congregationalism of Horace Bushnell. It demonstrates how the convergence of various intellectual trends in the nineteenth century—such as skepticism, sentimentalism, and biblical criticism—combined to push prominent American thinkers toward a concept of an open canon.

Chapter thirty-six is primarily concerned with the rise of Transcendentalism in America and Princeton’s response to this new variation of American Unitarianism. Hodge, along with Albert Dod and James W. Alexander, wrote early, stinging critiques of Transcendentalism for the Repertory. The articles were so well argued that the Unitarian Andrews Norton had them republished in his own battle against the rising influence of Transcendentalism in New England.

Thinkers unconnected to institutions were the most lively and creative thinkers in the US for much of the nineteenth century. These ‘amateurs’ were more willing to adopt untraditional, usually German, ideas; and they moved more quickly to modern, secular ideas. The most important of these thinkers were James Marsh of Vermont, who introduced Kantian ideas into America; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading Transcendentalist; Connecticut minister Horace Bushnell, who followed Nathaniel William Taylor in remaking the theology of New England and leading it to figurative and metaphorical interpretations of the Bible; John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff of the Mercersburg Seminary in Pennsylvania, who meditated on an organicist Protestant theology; and The St Louis Hegelians.

This chapter explores some of the intellectual trajectories of Edwards both in the United States and abroad. Although Edwards never produced a distinct philosophical school of thought, continuity can nevertheless be identified. On the American scene, common themes can be found in William Ellery Channing (unitarianism), Ralph Waldo Emerson (transcendentalism), Josiah Royce and William James (Harvard school, pragmatism), and even John Dewey (instrumentalism). More recently, the same can be said for William Harder Squires (German-trained American), Stephen H. Daniel (American), Miklos Vetö (Hungarian-French), and Oliver Crisp (British). As such, it is clear that Edwards's thought continues to be of interest to philosophers and has evoked complex, divergent, and even antithetical interpretations and responses.

This chapter commences with an overview of conservative representations of the 1950s and of the sociological studies that emerged to identify discontent at the time. It contains particular focus on Paul Goodman and Betty Friedan, before examining the roots of the counterculture in American Transcendentalism, Civil Rights and the European avant garde.

This chapter discusses how Australia is represented in Melville’s fiction as an epitome of British colonial legacies and as a figure of alterity, based on the country’s geographical position in the southern hemisphere. Melville’s own experience on an Australian whaler, as recounted in Omoo, is related to his broader interrogation of narratives of Manifest Destiny in Moby-Dick. This chapter goes on to describe how Emerson, Thoreau and other Transcendentalist writers aligned Australia with California as sites for gold diggers in the 1850s. It notes how Harriet Jacobs’s son died in Australia, how this British colony became seen by African Americans as a haven from slavery in the antebellum years, and also how these tensions influenced the nationalist politics of Australian politicians such as John Dunmore Lang. Finally, it charts how Emily Dickinson uses images from theories of geology and astronomy to chart trajectories of hemispheric reversal in her poetry.

Explores Henry Thoreau’s rationale for living simply and his emphasis on spirituality and sensuality via Transcendentalist and Eastern philosophy. Analysis his own relationship with both Capitalism and asceticism and his complicated mix of spiritualism and materialism. Finally looks at his posthumously published manuscript – Wild Fruits – and discusses its status as a potential blueprint for collective thrift.

Chapter Eight explores the major dilemma between faith and reason in modern Western thought. Dallmayr discusses the conflict between religion and secular life, asserting that both the divine and human life undergo constant transformation. The core of chapter eight focuses on the thought of philosopher Raimon Panikkar. Inspired in part by the Indian tradition of non-dualism, Panikkar hold that the problem in the modern age is due to the collusion of radical transcendentalism and agnostic immanentism. In this view, recovering a proper balance of life requires a basic acknowledgement of being in the world. Panikkar critiques both an immanentism neglectful of deeper spiritual aspirations and an abstract transcendentalism neglectful of social problems and ethical standards of public conduct. Dallmayr asserts that the situation is damaging to public life and basic requisites of democracy, as well as religion.

Despite the extensive discussion of Darwin in the Arabic press since at least the early 1870s, his Origin of Species was not translated until well into the twentieth century. This chapter examines the works of Isma‘il Mazhar, one of the last of the major Arab evolutionists and science popularizers. It focuses on his work on translation and his efforts at language reform in general, for Mazhar was an avid translator, and he spent a considerable amount of time deliberating on the literary, stylistic and conceptual implications of translation. (Later he would also go on to participate in one of Egypt’s first Arabic Language Academies, where he worked specifically on the problem of modern scientific translation.) In particular, the chapter considers his readings of Darwin in the face of growing suspicions of evolution’s entrenched materialism. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mazhar campaigned tirelessly against this perspective, and his own stance was as neo-positivist as it was transcendentalist. Nevertheless, the very subject of his work was quickly losing favour with Arabic readers, and his ideas on evolution and social progress, alongside his views on religion, language and politics, gained him few followers.

Ives’s essay on Emerson is less a description of that writer than an apologia for Ives’s compositional method, which is intentionally disunified and based on the discontinuous way in which humans perceive reality. The idea that Ives was a Transcendentalist himself (like Emerson) is difficult to maintain given the other, more conventional religious influences evident in Ives’s thinking. But there is a strong parallel between the way Emerson left the church at age 29, and Ives left the music world at page 27, both because they could no longer carry on the conventions of those worlds in good conscience.