Richard Higgins is a writer, book coach and the author or editor of five books, including, most recently, Thoreau’s God, from the University of Chicago Press, which explores Thoreau’s iconoclastic religious vision, and Thoreau and the Language of Trees, about Thoreau’s multifaceted love of trees. A Boston Globe staff writer for 20 years, Richard lives in Concord and is a member of the Thoreau Society board. A graduate of Holy Cross College, Columbia Journalism School, and Harvard Divinity School, Richard has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Century, American Scholar and other publications.

Thoreau’s God

A Conversation with

Richard Higgins

Wednesday, October 22

7:00 p.m.

Doors will open at 6:15 p.m. for a wine and cheese reception.

The Walden Woods Project
44 Baker Farm Road, Lincoln, MA

Concord author Richard Higgins will discuss his new book Thoreau’s God, which explores the riddle of Thoreau’s spiritual life. Although a harsh critic of the Christianity of his day, Thoreau was religious to the bone and had a profound sense of the holy. His critique of churches was matched only by his rapturous encounters with the divine in nature. Richard will present Thoreau as a religious thinker who sought to divorce the religious sentiment from its 19th-century institutional context. In essence, he was a mystic who, while firmly moored to the earth, was on a quest to commune with a divine mystery that was both immanent in the natural world and transcendent. He called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God. Thoreau’s eclectic, experiential spirituality is resonating with spiritual seekers in America today.