Alda Balthrop-Lewis

Alda Balthrop-Lewis is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. She studies ethics—the norms, principles, relationships, and practices people use in their efforts to live well. In Thoreau's Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2021), she explores questions of environmental justice, demonstrating how Henry David Thoreau's religious practice in Walden enacts the intrinsic connection between his ecological commitments and his political commitments to abolition and labor justice.

Her current book project, Contemplation and Complicity, examines twentieth-century Thoreauvians, particularly the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, and the ways his reading of Thoreau shaped his engagement with the politics of race and environment in the 1960s.

Balthrop-Lewis also supports scholarly publishing as an Associate Editor of Environmental Humanities and as co-editor, with Jonathan Tran, of the American Academy of Religion–sponsored book series Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion, published by Oxford University Press.