A panel with Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), John Modern (Franklin & Marshall College), and Alda Balthrop-Lewis (Australian Catholic University). Moderated by Branka Arsic (Columbia, English).
Thoreau’s life and work provide a productive entry point into a discussion of religion and climate. Alongside his own curiosities surrounding religion, the immanent, and the transcendent, his legacy within environmentalism and climate studies has often been harnessed in ways that approximate or play upon the sense of a spiritual or spirited conviction. Where is “religion” in—and for—Thoreau? And how, if at all, should it be understood in relation to the environmental movement and contemporary climate activism?