Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary George Ripley (October 3, 1802 – July 4, 1880) was an American social reformer, Unitarian minister, and journalist associated with Transcendentalism.

Shortly after, he became ordained as the minister of the Purchase Street Church in Boston, Massachusetts, where he began to question traditional Unitarian beliefs.

Shortly after, he resigned from the church to put Transcendental beliefs in practice by founding an experimental commune called Brook Farm.

His nearest brother was thirteen years older than he was and he was raised primarily by his conservative mother, who was distantly related to Benjamin Franklin, and his sisters.

[6] Before going to college, he spent three months in Lincoln with Ezra Ripley, a distant relative who also married the aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[13] There, he was influenced by Levi Frisbie, Professor of Natural Religion, who was largely interested in moral philosophy, which he termed "the science of the principles and obligations of duty".

[16] These ten years of his tenure there were quiet and uneventful,[17] until March 1836, when Ripley published a long article titled "Schleiermacher as a Theologian" in the Christian Examiner.

[20] Andrews Norton, a leading theologian of the day, responded publicly and insisted that disbelief in miracles ultimately denied the truth of Christianity.

[20] Ripley contended that to insist upon the reality of miracles was to demand material proof of spiritual matters, and that faith needed no such external confirmation; but Norton and the mainstream of Unitarianism found this tantamount to heresy.

[22] Ripley met with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederic Henry Hedge, and George Putnam in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 8, 1836, to discuss the formation of a new club.

The group at this first meeting of what would become known as the "Transcendental Club" included Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, and Convers Francis as well as Hedge, Emerson, and Ripley.

[27] Beginning in 1839, Ripley edited Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature: fourteen volumes of translations meant to demonstrate the breadth of Transcendental thoughts.

That year, Ripley gave a sermon titled "The Temptations of the Times", suggesting that the major problem in the country was "the inordinate pursuit, the extravagant worship of wealth".

He said, "Unless a minister is expected to speak out on all subjects which are uppermost in his mind, with no fear of incurring the charge of heresy or compromising the interests of his congregation, he can never do justice to himself, to his people, or the truth which he is bound to declare".

He soon decided he should leave the ministry altogether and, on October 3, 1840, he read a 7,300-word lecture, Letter Addressed to the Congregational Church in Purchase Street, expressing his dissatisfaction with Unitarianism.

Its 170 acres (0.69 km2) were about eight miles (13 km) from Boston; a pamphlet described the land as a "place of great natural beauty, combining a convenient nearness to the city with a degree of retirement and freedom from unfavorable influences unusual even in the country".

[41] Brook Farm was initially based mostly on the ideals of Transcendentalism; its founders believed that by pooling labor they could sustain the community and still have time for literary and scientific pursuits.

[43] In their free time, the members of Brook Farm enjoyed music, dancing, card games, drama, costume parties, sledding, and skating.

The New York Observer, for example, suggested that, "The Associationists, under the pretense of a desire to promote order and morals, design to overthrow the marriage institution, and in the place of the divine law, to substitute the 'passions' as the proper regulator of the intercourse of the sexes", concluding that they were "secretly and industriously aiming to destroy the foundation of society".

Ripley wrote a "Gotham Gossip" column and many articles discussing local personalities and notable public events, including speeches by Henry Clay and Frederick Douglass.

George Ripley remarried, to Louisa Sclossberger, in 1865, and was a part of the Gilded Age New York literary scene for the remainder of his life.

Contemporary publications rated him as one of the most important critics of the day, including the Hartford Courant, the Springfield Republican, the New York Evening Gazette, and the Chicago Daily Tribune.

[66] Henry Theodore Tuckerman commended Ripley as "a scholar and an aesthetic as well as technical critic: [he] knows public taste and the laws of literature".