Mon Dec 14 · 12pm
Public Research Talk: 1960s Transcendentalism in Black and White: Thomas Merton and William Melvin Kelley as Thoreauvians
Alda Balthrop-Lewis, associate professor of religion at Florida State University, treats Transcendentalism as a living tradition through two twentieth-century Thoreauvians: the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who left "the world" for the monastery, and the novelist William Melvin Kelley, who left Harvard and what he called "the Plantation." She is the author of Thoreau's Religion (2021), and the talk draws on her book in progress, Contemplation and Complicity.