Jeremy David Engels > Quotes

“On the most important theological matters, most Americans were not self-reliant. In fact, Americans were dependent on pulpit preachers and pushy philosophers to determine their relationship to the divine for them. Americans had ceded their agency to the frock and cowl. Emerson broke from the Christianity of his day because it disenfranchised individual spiritual seekers and prevented Americans from realizing their full potential for inspiration—a word derived from the Latin inspiratus and that, in the mystical tradition, means literally “to be filled with the breath of the divine.”
― Jeremy David Engels, The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita