It is not easy to have an original thought about Henry David Thoreau in the 21^st century, never mind to write an original book about him, but Alda Balthrop-Lewis has done just that. Her new book, Thoreau's Religion is the best study of Henry David Thoreau in at least a generation. Unlike recent efforts that have tried to innovate by reconstructing a granular chronicle of Thoreau's life for signs of sainthood (Walls, 2017) or by delving deeper into the minutiae of his journal to prove his mettle as an ecological thinker (Judd, 2018), Balthrop-Lewis has gone directly to the source of Thoreau's long-standing fame and has chosen to engage his masterpiece, the book Walden, or Life in the Woods, as evidence for the value of a particular practice also depicted in the book.

She begins by foregrounding and acknowledging Thoreau's privilege and ambitions, identifying him as “a member of the philosophical elite who had received the advantages of university education and wanted to do something with it that would enrich his own life and make the world a little better.” She connects this privilege to her readers who, she insists, “will recognize some form of a similar advantage in their own lives.” (11) She also clarifies the central focus of her study, which she describes as “political asceticism as a form of religious practice that intervenes in the political discourse and action of its world.” (15) This was Thoreau's project, she wants us to understand from the start, he cultivated an “asceticism aimed to sustain deeper relationships to all the world's delightful goods.” “This is an expansive account of social justice,” she warns us. And, indeed, it is.

Balthrop-Lewis's well-organized and highly readable study first deconstructs the more recent contemporary frames through which Thoreau has arrived in the modern imagination. “Too often the Thoreau of Walden, is imagined as asocial, apolitical, and areligious,” she argues. (37–38) Her first four chapters then systematically unpack and revise these interpretive mistakes.

In Chapter 1 “Thoreau's Social World” she indicates the broad view of society adopted by Thoreau in and through Walden. “In response to the view that sociality belonged only to the class of which Thoreau was a part,” Balthrop-Lewis writes, “Thoreau insisted that every being participates: frogs, birds, trees, winds, rains, but also foreigners, outsiders, and even the now-dead. … Thoreau's life in the woods was social life.” (87) This insight lays the foundation for Chapter 2 “The Politics of Getting a Living” in which Balthrop-Lewis masterfully extracts the political purposes toward which, she claims, Thoreau aimed. The expanded membership for social consideration provides the arena of consideration for political action which is itself an emergent quality deriving, in turn, from an active engagement with this new set of relationships. “That society in the woods was one that aimed to justly recognize every member,” Balthrop-Lewis points out. (120)

One of Balthrop-Lewis's key insights is that Thoreau did not seek to offer this political argument in the form of a rational argumentation. “Walden's politics is premised on a different hypothesis: that persuasion requires a seduction to the good through images and narrative.” (118) Balthrop-Lewis encourages us to notice the broad indulgent descriptive middle sections of Walden as demonstration of Thoreau's “more relational politics” (91) as against what is usually understood as classical liberal individualism, or the ‘self-reliance’ myth. These relational politics, instead of inspiring rugged individualism, “inspired him … to want to set relationships right. Such relational setting right just is what justice is,” she concludes. (93)

With this realignment in hand, Balthrop-Lewis then presents two chapters to overturn the notion that Thoreau was without religion as he undertook this engagement. Chapter 3 “Thoreau's Theological Critique of Philanthropy” unpacks the theme of philanthropy that runs throughout Walden, demonstrating how Thoreau in fact offers up a Christian theological argument against the philanthropy familiar to him. He intended through his life in the woods, “to enact a more relational ethic than the one he saw other Christian reformers pursuing in their philanthropic lives,” she concludes.

Chapter 4 “Political Asceticism” then consolidates the social, political, and religious together into a re-imagining of what Walden is and was and means to do. Balthrop-Lewis enlists the term “political asceticism” to embody the range of practices and rituals to which Thoreau committed himself at Walden and sought to promulgate through Walden – renunciation of excessive materialism, expanding one's notion of society as widely as possible, rapt attention to the minute details, “a radically descriptive project. … Thoreau's writing practice insisted on establishing relation via attention and it was the central ethical practice of his life in Walden Woods.” (191) Balthrop-Lewis concludes that Thoreau's political asceticism enabled the time and space for the necessary attention and writing. And that writing “made Thoreau into a person who could see relationships rightly; it persuaded him that the transformation of political life was one of his vocations; and it was the tool that he used to transform the politics of his own time and our own.” (208)

Chapter 5 “Delight in True Goods” then doubles back to inflate the whole enterprise with its ultimate charm and effectiveness. Balthrop-Lewis tells us that Thoreau “was guided by his conviction that persuasion requires a seduction to the good” and that “what turned human hearts toward anything was their enjoyment of the good in it.” Moreover, the general engagement of delight – as opposed to wonder or awe – in daily activities had a reiterative trickling up effect into lived weeks and months and years and even entire lifetimes. Put another way “for Thoreau, the things that we do – even and perhaps especially those things which modern taste takes to be ‘mean’ – determine what kind of people we are to become, what sort of art we make with our lives and bodies, and which god we will worship.” (225) “Thoreau simplified for positive gain” (229) Not just to understand, but “to be in relationship to, and live with, and care for” (230) the excessive beingness of everything around him. And once in relationship, the pursuit of and delight in true good can be seen as “a basic human obligation.” (247) Thoreau's question about how one lives life turns out to be richer and deeper and more profound than either the social justice or environmentalist readings of Thoreau alone have ever imagined.

In her conclusion, Balthrop-Lewis reveals a larger purpose of her study, which is to offer up Henry David Thoreau and, curiously, also Lynn White Jr., as two of a kind, writers who, to use White's words, focused on “inviting, tutoring, and pressuring moral communities to make better use of their inheritances.” Her evidence of White's impacts showing up in the emergence of Pope Francis and his encyclical Laudato Si is compelling and rounds out a thorough, convincing, and refreshingly original study of Henry David Thoreau.

Balthrop-Lewis has done exceptional work as a scholar with this successful articulation of Walden's religious meanings, offering up insights that provide useful and genuine challenges to all of us “readers” who seek to operate within what is called environmental or ecological ethics. In a wonderfully poignant Epilogue, Balthrop-Lewis wrestles with her own personal/professional connections to places and people and justice, reflecting with some narrative indulgence on a dip in the ocean where microscopic luminescent sea creatures made it look “as though the sea is sparkling back at the stars.” (280) On a shoreline impacted by Deepwater Horizon, she realized that she and the people she had been interviewing in the community had all been in a process of “mourning the lives and worlds we are losing. … Mourning the things we love and lose is a form of justice.” She concludes, “It renders what is due.” (281)