Wildness: Henry David Thoreau and the Making of an American Theology

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.