Alda Balthrop-Lewis
Key Details
Alda Balthrop-Lewis is the 2022-23 Denis Edwards Fellow at the Institute. Alda is currently Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University (ACU) where her research focuses on religion and the environment. She has previously taught ethics in the Religious Studies department at Brown University, and she has worked as a research assistant for the Peabody Award-winning public radio program On Being, produced in the United States. Her first book, Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism, on Henry David Thoreau and environmental justice, was published in 2021.
Alda grew up in Florida and spent time in London as a young person. Having met Professor Edwards as a colleague at ACU, she is honoured to be associated with this Fellowship which was established to commemorate his life and work.
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Research Interests
Alda’s research focuses on religious environmental ethics and the circulation of ideas among theological, artistic, and popular idioms. She has particular interests in the role of the emotions in environmental politics and in the way that the concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are related to theological histories of gender, race, nature, and nation. She is currently co-editor of the American Academy of Religion book series, Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion, published by Oxford University Press.
Her first book, Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), treats Henry David Thoreau as an inheritor of traditional ascetic practices, and it argues that his asceticism is politically relevant – both in his period and for contemporary environmental ethics.
Her ongoing research is about Thomas Merton’s “turning toward the world,” the transformation in his thinking about the significance of monasticism in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. She interprets Merton as an inheritor of Thoreau's religion, and her ongoing work contributes to the study of religion, race, and ecology through examinations of Merton’s engagements with other 1960s figures such as Martin Marty, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, William Melvin Kelley, and Rachel Carson.
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Education
PhD in Religion, Ethics, and Politics, Princeton University
M.Div, University of Chicago
BA in Religious Studies, Stanford University
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Selected Publications
Books
Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism, New Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought. (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Journal articles
Alimi, Toni, Elizabeth L. Antus, Alda Balthrop‐Lewis, James F. Childress, Shannon Dunn, Ronald M. Green, Eric Gregory, et al. “COVID-19 and Religious Ethics.” Journal of Religious Ethics 48.3 (2020), 349–87.
“Response to Ted Smith.” Modern Theology 36.1 (2020), 74–75.
“Active and Contemplative Lives in a Changing Climate: The Emersonian Roots of Thoreau’s Political Asceticism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87.2 (2019), 311–32.
“Exemplarist Environmental Ethics: Thoreau’s Political Asceticism against Solution Thinking.” The Journal of Religious Ethics 47.3 (2019), 525–50.
“Prophecy, Ethical Constraints, and Unjust Silence.” Journal of Religious Ethics 46.1 (2018), 157–66.
Book chapters
“Nature and Environment.” In The Oxford Handbook to Reinhold Niebuhr, Robin Lovin and Joshua Mauldin (eds), (Oxford University Press, 2021).
“Thoreau’s Woodchopper, Wordsworth’s Leech-Gatherer, and the Representation of ‘Humble and Rustic Life.’” In Theology and Ecology Across the Disciplines: On Care for Our Common Home, Celia Deane-Drummond and Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser (eds), (Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2018).
Popular articles and media
“‘Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity’: Henry David Thoreau and the politics of solitude,” ABC Religion and Ethics, March 2021.
“Thoreau’s Ethics of Delight,” Sightings, University of Chicago Divinity School, March 2021.
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Also published at Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge.
Guest on Meredith Lake’s Soul Search, ABC Radio National, (broadcast Sunday 14 March 2021).
“The Right Every Man Should Have,” The Cooperative blog, February 2021.
Podcast interview, The Study, January 2021.
Guest on Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens’s The Minefield, “What If Covid Doesn’t Go Away?” ABC Radio National (broadcast Wednesday 19 August 2020).
“What Baking Sourdough Can Teach Us about the Moral Life,” ABC Religion and Ethics blog, August 2020.
“Emotions of Isolation,” an online forum for the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, August 2020.
“Thoreau’s Asceticism as Obedience to a Higher Law,” Political Theology Network blog, April 2020.
“Henry David Thoreau: Saint of the Environmental Movement?” review of Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau by Kevin Dann and Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls, The Revealer, February 2019.
“Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him ‘Selfish,’”Religion Dispatches, October 22, 2015.
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