#  Alda Balthrop-Lewis 

Visiting Scholar, Transcendentalism Initiative

 

 

 



   ![Alda Balthrop-Lewis](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2025-07/Alda_headshot.jpeg?itok=73tyCAHC) 

 



 

 email <abalthroplewis@fsu.edu> 

 



 

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.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## Role
    
     [Affiliated Researchers](/role/affiliated-researchers)