Dan McKanan

Profile

Dan McKanan joined the Harvard Divinity School faculty in July 2008 as Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity. Before coming to Harvard, 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 newest book, Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition, is a general history of religion and the Left in the United States.