Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness

Hodder, Alan D.

doi:10.12987/yale/9780300089592.001.0001

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Day labor would have earned him the money in less time (in fact, his accounts show that he cleared about 50% more profit through day labor than through farming [Thoreau , 55, 60]), but bean‐farming, which for him can be the occasion for meditation, benefits him in more ways. Aesthetic experience, and in particular aural experience, is for Thoreau a pathway to revelation and spiritual ecstasy, as heightened sensibility elevates the person beyond the mundane (Hodder , 86–88). Hoeing beans, then, becomes a transcendental activity when the hoe strikes a stone or a buried shard of glass.…”

Section: Work As Askesismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thoreau criticized systematic theology for being an attempt to confine the divinity within human thought and language (Hodder , 151–59). It is not surprising, then, that he rejects traditional theological justifications for working.…”

Section: Thoreau's Theology Of Natural Abundancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…To Alan Hodder, the parable “essentialize[s]” a religious doctrine from which Thoreau took much guidance: “the Gita's teaching of disinterested action—action, that is, in which the actor focuses entirely on the work at hand with no consideration for its worldly results or rewards” (Hodder , 208). Thoreau's appropriation of the teaching, then, challenges Arendt's contention that work—and artistic work is for her the paradigm and only remaining form of work in a labor society—is our most worldly activity, creating things that endure across time and in space.…”

Section: Work As Cooperation With the Individual “Genius”mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Henry David Thoreau's Anti‐Work Spirituality and a New Theological Ethic of Work

Malesic¹

2017

Journal of Religious Ethics

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Although Henry David Thoreau stands outside the Christian canon, his outlook on the relations among spirituality, ecology, and economy highlights how Christian theologians can develop a theological work ethic in our era of economic and ecological precarity. He can furthermore help theologians counter the pro-work bias in much Christian thought. In Walden, Thoreau shows that the best work is an ascetic practice that reveals and reaps the abundance of nature and connects the person to the immanent divine and thereby glimpsing eternity. Thoreau thus offers the outline of a transformed theology of work even as he challenges Protestant vocationalism in the early industrial era. He is therefore a fitting if challenging guide for formulating a theology of the self as agent and product of work, at a moment when the postindustrial ideal of work that is both meaningful and remunerative seems ever more unattainable while the negative impact of our work on nonhuman nature is ever more apparent.

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Section: Work As Askesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Thoreau's Theology Of Natural Abundancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Work As Cooperation With the Individual “Genius”mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Henry David Thoreau's Anti‐Work Spirituality and a New Theological Ethic of Work

Malesic¹

2017

Journal of Religious Ethics

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“…I cite this poignant declaration at some length since it serves as a virtual compendium of several of the most distinctive features of Thoreau's personal religious and literary sensibility-the Wordsworthian sense of lost paradise, bodily wholeness, spiritual transport, and what he refers to here and elsewhere, following Emerson's own usage, as "extasy" (Hodder 2001).…”

Section: Born To Be a Pantheistmentioning

confidence: 99%

Christian Conversion, the Double Consciousness, and Transcendentalist Religious Rhetoric

Hodder

2017

Religions

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Despite the theological gulf that separated the Transcendentalists from their Puritan predecessors, certain leading Transcendentalists-Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau among them-often punctuated their writings, published and private, with literary representations of dramatic episodes of spiritual awakening whose rhetorical structure sometimes betrays suggestive parallels with traditional, recognizably Christian, forms of conversion rhetoric. While all of these Transcendentalists clearly showcase representations of dramatic religious experience in their work, this reliance on Christian rhetorical patterns is most obvious in the early writings of Emerson and Fuller. Thoreau's constructions reflect little ostensible Christian influence, yet even here, thematic continuities with earlier forms of religious self-expression are discernible.

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“…Here, in the metaphysical distinction between spirit ( purusha) and nature ( prak‰ti ), he discovered a philosophical basis for the peculiar sense of contemplative double consciousness which such meditations on the reflections of water were partly conceived to illustrate (134-35). 19 V…”

Section: Time In Waldenmentioning

confidence: 99%

In the Nick of Time: Thoreau's "Present" Experiment as a Colloquy of East and West

Hodder¹

2005

Religion Arts

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Taking recourse to my own nature, I create again and again this whole multitude of beings which are helpless under control of my nature.Bhagavad Gita 9.8 And therefore when [mind] turns to itself in thought, a trinity is formed in which a word too can be perceived. It is formed of course out of the very act of thought, with the will joining the two together. It is here then more than anywhere that we should recognize the image we are looking for. Augustine, Trinity 382By relating itself to its own self, and by willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the Power which constituted it. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death 182 I CircumscriptionsA s most readers of Walden immediately sense, the book's second chapter, "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," marks an important juncture in Thoreau's account of his life at Walden Pond. It is at this point that the narrator announces his move to Walden on a full-time basis-an event which took place, he says, "by accident" on "Independence Day," that is, the fourth of July, 1845. However accidental, the date was of course propitious, since moving to Walden represented a RELIGION and the ARTS 9:3-4 (2005): 235-257.

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Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness

Cited by 16 publications

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Henry David Thoreau's Anti‐Work Spirituality and a New Theological Ethic of Work

Henry David Thoreau's Anti‐Work Spirituality and a New Theological Ethic of Work

Christian Conversion, the Double Consciousness, and Transcendentalist Religious Rhetoric

In the Nick of Time: Thoreau's "Present" Experiment as a Colloquy of East and West

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