The Gospel According To This Moment: The Spiritual Message Of Henry David Thoreau

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum is delighted to welcome back author and Folio member Barry M. Andrews, in conversation with history editor Robin Lindley, about his new book The Gospel According To This Moment: The Spiritual Message Of Henry David Thoreau. 

Henry David Thoreau is primarily known as a writer, a naturalist and an advocate of environmental preservation, civil disobedience and simple living. But the thread on which all the beads of his many-faceted life are strung is his idiosyncratic and unconventional religious faith.

He had little use for religious creeds and institutions. He was put off by the hypocrisy and absolutism of sectarian religion. His god was in the woods, not in a church. He was, if anything, a nature mystic and a pantheist. His spirituality was devoid of doctrines or formulas or philosophic propositions. It had primarily to do with transcendent experiences triggered by his encounter with the natural world.

“The art of life,” he wrote. “By what disciplines to secure the most life.” The disciplines he practiced and described in Walden and elsewhere include leisure, self-reliance, reading, contemplation, solitude, sauntering in nature, simple living and journal writing. By such practices we may, even today, attempt “to secure the most life.”

Barry M. Andrews is author of several books on Transcendentalism and Transcendentalist authors, including Emerson, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. The Gospel According to This Moment is newly published by the University of Massachusetts Press. The author will be interviewed by Robin Lindley whose author interviews appear frequently in Crosscut.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle attorney, illustrator, and Features Editor for the History News Network. His writing has appeared in HNN and many other publications, and he has published more than 200 interviews with academic historians and other acclaimed authors on history. Most of his legal work was in public service. He earned a BA in History and JD in Law at UW and now serves on the UW History Department Advisory Board.