In and through his experience of nature, Henry David Thoreau imagined and developed a distinctly American theology of the wild. In Wildness: Henry David Thoreau and the Making of an American Theology, Lydia Willsky-Ciollo articulates how Thoreau was enmeshed in a decades-spanning project of crafting a theology of wildness. During Thoreau's post-college years and his time at Walden Pond, he evolved from hopeful writer to observant theologian, whose primary work as a surveyor enabled his theological vocation. Willsky-Ciollo skillfully guides readers through Thoreau's writings and life as his theology emerges and evolves. The focus of Thoreau's theology - wildness itself - centers on the divinity extant in every person and in every molecule of creation. Definitively American in its ethos, Thoreau's theology reflects a distinctly American set of tensions: progress and tradition, wilderness and civilization, the destructive and the generative nature of work, the individual and the society, the local and the universal, and the Christian and the pluralist. While remaining critical of dogmatism and institutional rigidity, he formed his theological vision in conversation with the Christianity of his own time and place. Ultimately, theology is an active process, and interpreting the wild experience of divine revelation is the purview of all. Thoreau left the door open to his readers, who he hoped would pick up the pen where he left off and write their own theologies of wildness.
Lydia Willsky-Ciollo is associate professor of religious studies and director of American Studies at Fairfield University. She is author of American Unitarianism and the Protestant Dilemma: The Conundrum of Biblical Authority and co-author with Eugene Gallagher of New Religions: Emerging Faiths and Religious Cultures in the Modern World.
Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction: A Theology of Muskrats and Skunk Cabbage, and of Men Part I: Roots 1. "I am a New-Englander": The World that Made Henry David Thoreau 2. "I pray for such inward experience": The Work of the Mind or, the Education of Henry David Thoreau Part II: Fruits 3. "Does Wisdom Work in a tread-mill?": Thoreau's Surveying Work and Theological Vocation 4. "May we not see God?": Henry David Thoreau's Doctrine of Spiritual Senses 5. "Naturalized, but on the Soil of the Earth": Thoreau, American Indians, and Salvation 6. "Talk of heaven! Ye disgrace earth": On Thoreau's Theology of Time, Death, and the Afterlife Part III: Communion Feast 7. "My New Testament": Wild Fruits as Scripture for a Wild Congregation Prologue: A task, unbroken Bibliography
"Through a novel and convincing reading of Thoreau's unpublished last work, Wild Fruits, Lydia Willsky-Ciollo displays how various influences culminate in Thoreau's injunction to cultivate one's inner wildness, that is, one's divinity." - Philip F. Gura, author of American Transcendentalism "In this rich, comprehensive, even lyrical introduction to Thoreau and Transcendentalism, Lydia Willsky-Ciollo seeks to renew both Thoreau and divinity for a secular world. Her bold new argument gives us a Thoreau who still matters deeply, whose "theology of the wild" is deliberate, coherent, well-founded in the history of religious thought, and profoundly meaningful today - an environmental faith not meant to be confined to a bookshelf, but to live and grow in our shared world of natural beauty and spiritual meaning." - Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau
