The Self At Walden Pond

The Self at Walden Pond

Whether the contemporary UU focuses on reforming the self or society seems to me a concern about how an individual's way of living impacts others..

The idea of individualized transcendence seems to be analogous with the perceptive of Emerson's contemporaries who believed that the reform of the self was a form of a conferred spiritual democracy. Conferred because in theory, perhaps they could label it a spiritual democracy. Yet, looking at the historical events of the time where, for example, blacks did not have equal rights to resources, for a black person of the time, such liberation if it existed would be rather aloof. While some Unitarians argued that the self is the part of the society, and that therefore