Dan McKanan

Dan McKanan is Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Uni-versalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School. Before coming to Harvard in 2008, he served as department chair and associate professor of theology at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University, where he began teaching in 1998. He studies religious movements for social transformation in the United States from the abolitionist era to the present. His first book, Identifying the Image of God: Radical Christians and Nonviolent Power in the Antebellum United States (2002), explores theological understandings of violence and nonviolence among abolitionists, pacifists, and temperance activists. Touching the World: Christian Communities Transforming Society (2007) and The Catholic Worker after Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation (2008) deal with the Camphill and Catholic Worker networks of intentional communities. Professor McKanan’s more recent book, Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition, is a general history of religion and the Left in the United States