#  Rudolf Steiner at 100: Anthroposophy in Dialogue 

 





August 06, 2026

 

 

 [ Dan McKanan ](/people/dan-mckanan-0) 

In December 2025, as the Harvard Divinity School (HDS) campus was emptying out for the winter holiday, two hundred people gathered in person in Swartz Hall, along with hundreds more online, to mark the centennial of the death of spiritual teacher Rudolf Steiner. This gathering, hosted by the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality (PES) with generous financial support from the Center for the Study of World Religions, was perhaps the only centennial event anywhere in the world that brought committed students of Steiner into deep dialogue with neutral and critical scholars from the academy. It came at a moment when the range of initiatives inspired by Steiner’s teaching continues to expand, even as multiple aspects of Steiner’s legacy provoke critical scrutiny in the academy and beyond.

   ![Rudolf Steiner](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-07/500px-Steiner_um_1905.jpg?itok=Sc99W-PO) 

 

Rudolf Steiner. Source: WikiCommonsThe conference was the brainchild of Steiner scholars Henry Holland and Aaron French, who approached me in 2024 with the idea of a conference. By that time, PES had already hosted a few conferences, so I knew we could accommodate a substantial conference with both in-person and Zoom-based participants. Since all previous PES conferences had engaged multiple traditions simultaneously, it took a little convincing for me to agree to devote an entire conference to Steiner’s spiritual tradition, known as anthroposophy. However, I knew that the CSWR had had great success with a similar gathering devoted to the tradition of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. The more I talked with Henry and Aaron, the more it became clear that HDS was uniquely situated to bring together people who don’t always talk with one another.

My own longstanding interest in anthroposophy flows from its practical manifestations. What distinguishes anthroposophy from the other organizational descendants of the Theosophical Society is the fact that Rudolf Steiner gave many series of lectures applying spiritual insights to specific professional fields. The professionals who attended those lectures created global networks of Waldorf schools, biodynamic farms, medical practices, intentional communities supporting children and adults with disabilities, and much more. I have written extensively on the network of anthroposophical communities known as the Camphill movement. Nowadays, most Camphillers and other participants in anthroposophical “initiatives” do not practice anthroposophical spirituality, yet the rhythms of their lives are shaped by Steiner’s ideas about the correspondences linking human bodies, souls, and spirits to the deep structures of the universe.

Hosting this conference was a delightful opportunity to practice the fine art of dialogue among people of diverse viewpoints. In selecting keynoters, we deliberately chose a scholar who has been critical of aspects of anthroposophy, Boaz Huss, alongside Martina Maria Sam, a scholar and editor who has held leadership positions in anthroposophy’s School of Spiritual Science. We encouraged conference participants to engage Huss’s and Sam’s contributions with equal respect, and for their own parts Huss and Sam spoke in a dialogical spirit that made this easy to do.

Our conference program did not shy away from some of the most difficult topics facing academic communities today. Rudolf Steiner, who built his movement in early twentieth-century Germany, died shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power. Some of his closest followers colluded with National Socialism in order to keep anthroposophy alive in the 1930s and 1940s, and some Nazi leaders were important patrons of biodynamic farms and other anthroposophical initiatives. Other anthroposophists, including many Jewish anthroposophists, were staunchly opposed to fascism. But even ethnically Jewish anthroposophists, such as Camphill founder Karl König, sometimes held negative views of Jewish religion. Our conference presenters did not merely acknowledge these realities but challenged all of us to wrestle with their nuances. Peter Selg, an anthroposophical doctor who serves on the governing board of the General Anthroposophical Society, delineated the multiple shades of collaboration and resistance among those who practiced anthroposophical medicine under the Third Reich. Both Boaz Huss and Ron Eilon traced the complex pathways by which Jewish anthroposophists reinterpreted Steiner’s critical comments about ethnic nationalism as they found a place for anthroposophical initiatives in the state of Israel.

We also created space for one of the most challenging debates currently unfolding within the community of committed anthroposophists. Rudolf Steiner, like his predecessors in the theosophical movement, affirmed the spiritual equality of all individuals while also ascribing spiritual significance to racial differences, teaching that each race makes a unique contribution to human evolution. He also occasionally used derogatory language for non-European racial groups. Some anthroposophists believe that Steiner’s teachings about racial difference must be repudiated in order to allow his teaching about human equality to shine forth more clearly, and several anthroposophical initiatives have issued public statements to this effect. Other anthroposophists believe that Steiner’s understanding of racial difference provides a better path to racial justice than models of critical race theory currently prominent in the academy. In our panels, scholars holding both these perspectives met face to face, wrestling with the details of one another’s arguments.

Our conference also showcased the global reach of the anthroposophical movement today. Though in its origin anthroposophy was more Eurocentric than its theosophical cousins, the practicality of anthroposophical initiatives has proven to have cross-cultural appeal. Our program included especially strong contingents of Brazilians and Israelis, as well as individuals from Nigeria, India, Pakistan, China, Japan, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Two panels on Waldorf education, in particular, revealed a movement of educational renewal that is currently experiencing its greatest growth in places far from its point of origin.

For me, another highlight of the conference was the chance to see some of the Anthroposophical movement’s most prominent leaders engaged in deep scholarly work. In many ways, anthroposophy is a spiritual movement with the soul of a university. Its global headquarters, the Goetheanum in Switzerland, is home to a School of Spiritual Science organized like a college faculty, with sections devoted to visual arts, literary arts, natural science, social science, mathematics and astronomy, medicine, pedagogy, performing parts, agriculture, youth, and inclusive social development. And yet many anthroposophists who have taught at mainstream universities have encountered so much ridicule or misunderstanding that they have chosen to bracket their spiritual commitments from their academic work. At our conference, by contrast, past and present leaders of half a dozen School of Spiritual Science sections offered rigorous, often archivally based presentations that were readily accessible to neutral and critical scholars. These offerings meshed seamlessly with a similar number of presentations by current doctoral students, with diverse relationships to anthroposophy, who are studying at non-anthroposophical universities. I could feel the weight of many old walls coming down as participants listened and learned.

Most participants came away from our two days together eager for more dialogue. Many of the presentations are likely to appear in a volume that is currently being edited by Aaron French, Henry Holland, and Mary Graham, while others will appear in scholarly journals. As for the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality, we continue to welcome scholars and practitioners of all spiritualities to our conferences, working groups, and other activities that explore the ongoing transformation of spiritual practice in contemporary society.