Episode #57: Dr. Dan McKanan: Camphills, Intentional Communities, and the Spiritual Roots of Radical Change

MICROCOLLEGE: The Thoreau College Podcast

This week's guest on the Microcollege podcast is Dr. Dan McKanan, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School who is one of the foremost American scholars of biodynamic agriculture and the Camphill communities, two influential movements applying the ideas of Rudolf Steiner in practical fields. In our conversation, we learn about Dan's own formative experiences in intentional communities with spiritual roots and a focus on radical social transformation, as well as the ways in which elite universities like Harvard sometimes fail to live up to their calling to help young people find their way to lives of service.

Dan serves as the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, where he has taught since 2008. He studies religious and spiritual movements for social transformation in the United States and beyond, with particular emphasis on environmental activism, intentional communities, and socialism. Much of his research focuses on the Unitarian Universalist tradition and the anthroposophical movement. He is the author of six books, among them Camphill and the Future: Spirituality and Disability in an Evolving Communal Movement, Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism, and Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition. Earlier works explored the Catholic Worker movement and nonviolent activism in the early nineteenth century.

Links:

Dr. Dan McKanan: https://hds.harvard.edu/people/dan-mckanan

Camphill and the Future: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520344082/camphill-and-the-future

Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism: https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520290068

Thoreau College: www.thoreaucollege.org