From Commonweal (3/18/2025), a Catholic journal of opinion, and oldest independent lay-edited Catholic journal in the United State:
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“Thoreau’s understanding of Darwin is particularly illuminating. While later writers would extract from Darwin a justification for social hierarchy that saw the richest as the best-adapted, Thoreau, Buell writes, mined Origin of Species for ‘its insights about species distribution, not species mutability.’”
“If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, Thoreau offers something better: not just imagining but practicing the end of capitalism.”
“Thoreau was committed to seeing humans as a collective species—not lords of our domain, but codependent beings engrossed in a shared habitat. Realizing that requires distance, detachment, estrangement: we must go away from ourselves, from our individual interests and concerns, our social habits and habitats, from our assumptions and even from our language, in order to return more free. That won’t just make us better people. It will also make us better neighbors, citizens, and friends.”
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