Event details
"Thoreau's Walden: A Religious Vision of Environmental Justice?" with Alda Balthrop-Lewis
Come engage with Alda Balthrop-Lewis as part of the Religion and Environmental Justice Event Series. Dr. Balthrop-Lewis will cover themes in her book Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge, 2021).
Thoreau is sometimes seen as asocial, apolitical, and areligious. In contrast, this talk will argue that Walden articulates a form of ‘political asceticism.’ Drawing on theological ideas taken from the sayings of Jesus and on global religious traditions of voluntary poverty, Thoreau held that disciplined personal practices are bound up with the reformation of social and political life. His time in the woods was oriented not only toward contemplative ecstasy in nature but also toward just economy, for those enslaved in the South, for those who labored in the North, and for those whose lives he knew best in Concord. In this, we might reread Walden not as the individualist, naturalist bible it has long been, but instead as a text invested in a certain kind of environmental justice.
Dr. Balthrop-Lewis's lecture will be followed by a response, conversation, and reception.
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