The Annual Bellows Lecture

 

will be given on

​Sunday, Nov. 13, 2022 at 2:00pm on ZOOM

 

by Professor Lydia Willsky-Ciollo

​

​Strange Bedfellows?

Henry David Thoreau and Unitarianism

​

Henry David Thoreau left the Unitarian church in his early 20s, and famously found his church out in nature, where "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads" as he wrote in Walden.  He has been viewed by scholars and popular audiences alike as anti-religious.  However, his calls to a more simple life, the preservation of nature’s resources, a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and the use of reason and conscience as a guide, are now all reflected in our Unitarian Universalist Principles.  This lecture will explore Thoreau's relationship to his nineteenth-century Christian, specifically Unitarian, context, positing that perhaps Thoreau was not so far from those who sat in the pews on Sundays, as many imagine him to be.

 

Dr. Lydia Willsky-Ciollo is an historian of American religion, with a focus on Early Republic and antebellum religious movements, particularly Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and new religious movements. In her work she seeks to expand the traditionally Christian narrative of American religion to include those often excluded due to gender, race, class, ethnicity, or religious tradition.

 

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Selected contributions (with contributors' permission) will be posted in the Community Stories section of this website. Our aim is to capture, among other things, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the uprising against racial injustice on our community.  For more details, see Preserving the Present as a Legacy for the Future. 

Please send your contributions to us at archives@allsoulsnyc.org.  ​Thank you!

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