“The thinking person, as Emerson suggests in his essay on the American scholar, is anyone who faintly remembers the wholeness of a world that we can only experience partially.” 

Thomas Dumm, from LONELINESS AS A WAY OF LIFE

 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, nineteenth century essayist and poet, preached in Northampton for a short time.  At this evening inspired by Emerson, Thomas Dumm and the Reverend Dr. F. Jay Deacon will discuss Emerson, and author Tracy Kidder will read from his own work.

Rev Dr. F. Jay Deacon is a Unitarian Universalist minister. He currently serves the Unitarian Universalist Church of Manchester, New Hampshire.  A student of Transcendentalism, he is a member of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. Jay has served congregations in Northampton and Chicago, IL (Unity Temple, the Oak Park
building, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to express the Emersonian religious vision), among others. He leads seminars in “The Transcendentalist Spirit and an Evolutionary Spirituality.” He lives in Westhampton,
Massachusetts. For more, see his website: jaydeacon.net

Thomas Dumm is Professor of Political Science at Amherst
College.  Among honors he has received is a Guggenheim fellowship.  His books include Loneliness as a Way of Life
and A Politics of the Ordinary. 

 
Tracy Kidder has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book
Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes. The author of Strength in What Remains, Mountains Beyond Mountains, My Detachment, Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine, Kidder lives in the Pioneer Valley. 

Part of the Local History/Local Novelists Series curated by Forbes Writer in Residence Susan Stinson. For more information, visit www.forbeslibrary.org or call 413-587-1017.  All events are free and open to all.