Richard Higgins will discuss his new book, Thoreau’s God, which recovers a central thread in Thoreau’s life and work that has been ignored or dismissed—his personal religiosity and iconoclastic theological vision. Both are woven through Thoreau’s work as a naturalist and his philosophical thought and ethical commitments. Although a harsh critic of historical Christianity, Thoreau was religious to the bone and had a profound sense of the holy. In a time of religious upheaval, he was a pioneer who sought to divorce the religious sentiment from its 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.