Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism. By Alda Balthrop-Lewis

Abstract

In this gorgeously written and theoretically robust book, Alda Balthrop-Lewis has given Thoreau scholarship and the broader field of environmental ethics one of the most important works about America’s so-called “patron saint of environmentalism” to appear in many years. Thoreau’s Religion joins a renaissance of scholarship that has followed in the wake of Thoreau’s bicentennial in 2017. Since the late Stanley Cavell’s various philosophical meditations on Thoreau, I can think of few others who have done so much to restore the vital importance of Christian thought and Biblical scripture behind Thoreau’s most well-known work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, originally published in 1854. Some of Balthrop-Lewis’s insightful excavations of the biblical intertextual echoes that punctuate Walden make Thoreau’s Religion alone worthy of our attention; that it has so much more to offer is a testament to Balthrop-Lewis’s knack for having written something that is much more than just another historically situated study of Thoreau that embeds him in various streams of influence, Christian or otherwise. This is a book that cogently demonstrates why and how Thoreau (still) matters for the Anthropocene—that he remains a useful interlocutor in our present, someone who can speak to the twinned crises of climate calamity and our ongoing dysfunctional politics.