Kittelstrom narrates the story of this breed of religious liberalism through the lives of seven people: John Adams, Mary Moody Emerson,
William Ellery Channing, William James, Thomas Davidson, William Mackintire Salter, and Jane Addams.
Other figures featured include Anne Hutchinson, Jonathan Mayhew,
William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, Henry Ward Beecher, Russell H.
Chapter five focuses on the changing opinion of the influential Unitarian and Whig,
William Ellery Channing. Initially opposed to both slavery and its more radical critics, Channing, over the 1830s, moved toward abolitionism, inspired in good measure by evidence that British emancipation, had not precipitated race warfare or economic collapse in their Caribbean islands.
As
William Ellery Channing once said, "Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage.
Hurth makes no mention of the Scottish philosophers or of
William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian spokesman who best rephrased the Scots' modest trust in human nature for liberal American Christians.
Name a key event in early America and one of the Peabody sisters was there: attending Transcendentalist Club meetings, editing The Dial, helping to organize the utopian Brook Farm, walking with Henry David Thoreau, discoursing on religion and abolition with
William Ellery Channing, reforming schools with Horace Mann, hosting Margaret Fuller's Conversations, enjoying nature with Ralph Waldo Emerson, lending her name to Louisa May Alcott's little sister, "Beth" of Little Women, getting Nathaniel Hawthorne the customs inspector position that frames The Scarlet Letter, and inspiring his complex heroines.
Always eager to learn, she continued to study German with the famous transcendentalist minister
William Ellery Channing. Through him, she soon met other celebrated transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederic Henry Hedge, and others.
In a reversal of the orientation of the New England mind since Jonathan Edwards, however, Unitarian theologian
William Ellery Channing insisted that virtue could not be "infused into us without our own moral activity" (p.
He was the younger brother of
William Ellery Channing.
Learned, wide-ranging, and copiously endnoted, it includes detailed analyses of
William Ellery Channing, Edwards Amasa Park, Charles Hodge, A.