Alda Balthrop-Lewis

Alda Balthrop-Lewis (PhD, Princeton University) studies ethics—the norms, principles, relationships, and practices that people use in trying to live well. In Thoreau's Religion (Cambridge, 2021), she focused this work on environmental justice, showing how Henry David Thoreau's religious practice in Walden enacts the intrinsic connection between Thoreau's ecological, more-than-human investments and his political commitment to abolition and labor justice. Her current writing project, Contemplation and Complicity, focuses on twentieth-century Thoreauvians, especially the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the reading he did in the politics of race and environment of the 1960s.

She is a keen supporter of other academic writers, and she welcomes inquiries from students. She serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Environmental Humanities and is co-editor (with Jonathan Tran) of Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion, a book series sponsored by the American Academy of Religion and published by Oxford University Press.