Meditative reflections on the great spiritual seeker’s deeply felt experience of the divine.

Henry David Thoreau’s spiritual life is a riddle. Thoreau’s passionate critique of formal religion is matched only by his rapturous descriptions of encounters with the divine in nature. He fled the church only to pursue a deeper communion with a presence he felt at the heart of the universe. He called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God.

In Thoreau’s God, Richard Higgins invites seekers—religious or otherwise—to walk with the great Transcendentalist through a series of meditations on his spiritual life. Thoreau offers us no creed, but his writings encourage reflection on how to live, what to notice, and what to love. Though his quest was deeply personal, Thoreau devoted his life to communicating his experience of an infinite, wild, life-giving God. By recovering this vital thread in Thoreau’s life and work, Thoreau’s God opens the door to a new understanding of an original voice in American religion that speaks to spiritual seekers today.

Richard Higgins is a former staff writer at the Boston Globe and the author or editor of four books, including Thoreau and the Language of Trees. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Century, and American Scholar.

Introduction: Thoreau’s Religious Quest
One: An Offering to the Gods
Two: The Shaping of a Seeker
Three: To Reverence, Not to Fear
Four: The Seen and the Unseen
Five: A Puritan Golden Calf
Six: Rejecting Repentance
Seven: “Dealt With by Superior Powers”
Eight: A Pantheon with an Open Roof
Nine: Thoreau’s God
Ten: To “Fable the Ineffable”
Eleven: An Immortal Companion
Twelve: Thoreau and the “Prince of Radicals”
Thirteen: An Inkwell in Heaven
Fourteen: “Go Thou My Incense”
Fifteen: “I Hear the Unspeakable”
Sixteen: “A Place beyond All Place”
Seventeen: Thoreau’s Refining Fire

Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Notes
Index