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"Through a novel and convincing reading of Thoreau's unpublished last work, Wild Fruits, Lydia Willsky-Ciollo displays how various influences culminate in Thoreau's injunction to cultivate one's inner wildness, that is,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