Our people

Dr Alda Balthrop-Lewis

Research Fellow
Religion and Theology

Areas of expertise: religion and society; religious ethics; theological ethics; political theology; theology and ecology; environmental ethics; religion and democracy; literature and theology; ethnography

Email: alda.balthrop-lewis@acu.edu.au

Location: ACU Melbourne Campus

ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9017-2655

Alda Balthrop-Lewis is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. Before coming to ACU she completed a B.A. at Stanford University, a M.Div. at The University of Chicago and a Ph.D. at Princeton University in Religion, Ethics, and Politics. She has taught in the Religious Studies department at Brown University, and she has worked as a research assistant for the Peabody Award-winning public radio program On Being, produced in the United States.

Her research focuses on religious ethics and the circulation of ideas among theological, artistic, and popular idioms. Her forthcoming book, Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge University Press), treats Henry David Thoreau as an inheritor of traditional ascetic practices, and argues that his asceticism is politically relevant – both in his period and for contemporary environmental ethics.

Select publications

Journal articles

• “Active and Contemplative Lives in a Changing Climate: The Emersonian Roots of Thoreau’s Political Asceticism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87, no. 2 (May 30, 2019): 311–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfz010.
• “Exemplarist Environmental Ethics: Thoreau’s Political Asceticism against Solution Thinking.” The Journal of Religious Ethics 47, no. 3 (September 2019): 525–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.12275
• “Prophecy, Ethical Constraints, and Unjust Silence.” Journal of Religious Ethics 46, no. 1 (March 1, 2018): 157–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.12210

Book chapters

• “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Politics of Nature.” In The Oxford Handbook to Reinhold Niebuhr, edited by Robin Lovin and Joshua Mauldin. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
• “Thoreau’s Woodchopper, Wordsworth’s Leech-Gatherer, and the Representation of ‘Humble and Rustic Life.’” In Theology and Ecology Across the Disciplines: On Care for Our Common Home, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser. Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2018.

Public engagement

• “Henry David Thoreau: Saint of the Environmental Movement?” review of Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau by Kevin Dann and Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls, The Revealer, February 2019.
• “Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him ‘Selfish,’”Religion Dispatches, October 22, 2015.