 It is sometimes associated today with philosophical, social, or political movements such as liberalism, feminist theology, and green politics.Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a pioneer of the idea of spirituality as a distinct field.He was one of the major figures in Transcendentalism, an early 19th-century liberal Protestant movement, which was rooted in English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of Hume, and Neo-Platonism.