Lost Intimacy in American Thought engages Henry David Thoreau, Stanley Cavell, Hanna Arendt, Henry Bugbee, Henry James, Bruce Wilshire, and others as exemplars of intimate, transformational writing that celebrates subtle mutual recognitions and encounters with place, that articulates limit conditions of birth and death, and modulations of grief and delight. Mooney traces writers who crisscross between literature, religion, and philosophy, in exploration that renews affect and sensibility. Through passionate address, they provoke and energize occluded corners and aspects of memory, and release