Description
Thoreau’s God is the most subtle and probing assessment yet of the many senses in which Thoreau must be understood as a deeply religious person. —Lawrence Buell, author of Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently
Concord author Richard Higgins will discuss his new book Thoreau’s God, from the University of Chicago, which explores Thoreau’s spirituality, his sense of our innate spiritual abilities, his perception of God in nature and his sense of the sacred in the ordinary. Thoreau was a harsh critic of “respectable” Christianity in his day, but he was religious to the bone and had a profound sense of the holy. Richard will present Thoreau as a religious thinker who tried to separate the universal religious impulse from its 19th-century institutional context. In essence, Thoreau was a mystic who, while firmly moored to the earth, was on a quest to commune with a divine mystery that was both immanent in the natural world and transcendent. He called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God. Thoreau’s eclectic, experiential spirituality is resonating with spiritual seekers in America today.
