Dan McKanan is the Emerson Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, where he has taught since 2008. He is the author or editor of eight books exploring religious social activism, intentional communities, environmentalism, and Unitarian Universalist history. His books include Camphill and the Future: Spirituality and Disability in an Evolving Communal Movement (University of California Press, 2020), Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2017) and Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (Beacon Press, 2011), which won the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award. He also served as lead editor of the two-volume A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism (Skinner House Books, 2017). His current research focuses on the religious liberals who worked to preserve wild spaces in metropolitan Boston in the nineteenth century.

Dan McKanan
Emerson Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School

Monday, October 23, 2023

7:00 PM

Online event
(on Zoom)

“TRANSCENDENTALISTS HONORING ANCESTORS”

The Transcendentalists were among the first descendants of white settlers to live on territory that had been inhabited by their ancestors for seven generations. And so they faced a special challenge. How could they honor their ancestors while also making reparation for the violence those ancestors had perpetrated against the indigenous and ecological communities of the Americas? This presentation will explore the distinctive spiritual practices that Unitarians and Transcendentalists created in response to this challenge—among them, the creation of “garden cemeteries,” the preservation of wild spaces, and the retelling of colonial history.