Hosted at Harvard and warmly welcomed by the Anthroposophical Society in America, the 100 Years Rudolf Steiner Conference was a milestone in the history of anthroposophy. However, this was not an anthroposophical conference; this was an academic conference that took Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy as its subject matter.
Seven months before the 100 Years Rudolf Steiner Conference, I spoke with Dan McKanan at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) to ask about having the Anthroposophical Society in America host an opening reception. At the time, HDS was inundated with papers and proposals, leading to what would be one of the most successful and well-attended conferences to date in the Divinity School’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality. Harvard launched this program in 2020 to support the scholarly study of emerging spiritual movements through working groups, a newsletter, and an annual conference. Dan told me this was the first time the conference focused on an individual and a single spiritual stream, highlighting the ongoing and significant relationship within the anthroposophical movement to its founder, one century on.
What excited me most about the event was that it was independently initiated, not as a request from the Anthroposophical Society to Harvard but by scholars interested in Rudolf Steiner’s work. These researchers, Henry Holland and Aaron French, were asking a question, not of the Society and its membership, but of the academy. The fact that they asked it under the auspices of Harvard, one of the world’s leading academic institutions, is, for me, a testament to the impact of Rudolf Steiner’s life and work in the world as a scholar, philosopher, and spiritual scientist.
Through the months of pre-conference planning, I learned that Dan, Henry, and Aaron felt that Harvard was uniquely positioned to convene what they deemed a necessarily academic conference—focusing on Rudolf Steiner at the centennial of his life and work by providing neutral space for the intersection of adherents, fringe, and opponents alike. With a foundation of sympathetic curiosity, they hoped for antithetical perspectives on each panel. And they enthusiastically welcomed the organizational presence of the Anthroposophical Society in America, as well as the Christian Community.
Placing the Hard Stuff First
The Society’s opening reception was held off-campus at the Sheraton Commander Hotel. Initially, there was a mood of high anticipation as guests made their way into the Liberty Room. During my short welcome address, I spoke of the sublime nature of Rudolf Steiner’s activity as a poet, not merely in a literary sense but in his “translation into the super-sensible.”1
I took as an example his description of Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion from the Third Scientific Course (GA 323, January 3, 1921), where he demonstrates how Newton “killed Kepler’s laws,” diminishing the harmony expressed by Kepler and rendering the spirit inaccessible through his description of the “force of gravity.” Rather than dismiss Newton, however, Rudolf Steiner goes on in this course to describe how, with living thinking, we can enliven Newton.
It was my intent to open the conference in this same mood: we were about to experience ideas, research, and thoughts that might feel like an assault on the beautiful, living nature of anthroposophy—our task would be to engage what comes with living thinking, to not rest with what is imparted as absolutes but to take in the thoughts, whether agreeable or not, and awaken and restore the forces for life within them.
I had anticipated discourse on the challenges of researching the biography of a spiritual initiate and of articulating threshold encounters. But just there, I encountered my own bias—this was not an anthroposophical conference; this was an academic conference that took Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy as its subject matter. The difference is worth noting.
And this was made immediately clear in the opening keynote by Henry Holland and Aaron French. As it turned out, their approach was not an exploration of Rudolf Steiner as a spiritual initiate but an exploration, deeply researched and sometimes uncomfortable, about how Rudolf Steiner met and responded to his critics. Their topic was Biography in the Mirrors of the Biographers, or Writing the Life of Rudolf Steiner—Empirical Facts, Polemical Insinuations, and Imaginative Insights. I had hoped this would be an exploration of the challenges Rudolf Steiner’s biographers faced in trying to elucidate the path he took in joining the reason and logic of the material world with the realities of the spiritual world. But this is no small feat, and instead, what we heard was how Rudolf Steiner himself surmounted the often-contradictory attacks made against him.
After their keynote, the mood in the room was markedly different. Where there had been a feeling of celebratory anticipation, now there was concern, even discomfort, ultimately expressed by the final question to Henry and Aaron from an audience member, “Why did you do that?”
It would be easy to imagine that the elevated social mood was deflated by this opening encounter, but in the ensuing days, it was evident that quite the opposite happened. It was as though by placing the hard stuff first and introducing it through the lens of how Rudolf Steiner engaged dead scientific research through ennobling rather than diminishing another’s thought, the potential for impasse between participants and presenters was surmounted.
This was further supported by the fact that the Society’s opening reception was the only place in the program that allowed for artistic performance. The evening culminated spectacularly with beautiful presentations by the Eurythmy Spring Valley Ensemble (ESV) and later, by Michael Hernandez, who, with his soprano saxophone, demonstrated exceptional talent and research on Music in the Light of Anthroposophy. From my perspective, the eurythmy and music were propitious, appearing like a bridge that allowed participants to move on from the bumps of the opening night into the following days of intense social and intellectual encounter, with grace.
Shaping a Community of Research
Throughout the following days, a liveliness pervaded the halls and conference rooms, where two simultaneous tracks of panels were held (74 in all). The tight scheduling lent itself to a strong sense of camaraderie with old friends and new acquaintances, everyone sharing with each other what they heard or making inquiries about what they missed. It felt epic and historic passing through the halls of learning, from the James Room East to Cader Hall, and down the long, carpeted corridor to the dining area, where we crowded together at long tables shielded by the high stone walls and deep wood paneling from the bitter cold that was blowing outside the leaded glass windows.
Angelika Schmitt’s presentation of unpublished materials from the Rudolf Steiner Archive was exciting as the first panel in the Cader Room, and Jon McAlice demonstrated his gifts as a teacher, filling in for Craig Holdrege on Goethe, Schiller, and the Evolution of Science. Oliver Ray’s presentation on Anthroposophical Anarchism and the Decentralization of the Spirituality was delivered like the recitation of an epic poem. And I was particularly moved by the warmth and enthusiasm with which Boaz Huss invited us into the experience of anthroposophy in Israel, from the intimacy of family encounter to the objective reality of the cultural challenges that have been encountered along the way.
The Cader Room is a stereotypical university lecture space, with rows of seats sloping down toward the lectern and chalkboard at the front. Entry is also at the front, on either side of the board, so the coming and going of participants throughout each session was very much a part of the mood—it was all busyness, hushed anticipation, and concentration. The room was packed for Peter Selg’s talk on The Conduct of Anthroposophical Doctors, Pharmacists, and Educators During the Nazi Era, and Gopi Krishna brought welcome humor and accessible research on Organic Thinking as a Prerequisite for Discussions on Race with a Special Emphasis on India-Britain. There was so much more. The fact that it was simply not possible to take it all in contributed a great deal to the sense of community—we had to rely on each other to really develop a sense of the whole.
Much of my time was spent getting participants and presenters in front of the video camera, where we conducted interviews intended to capture the mood of the event and to record this moment in the history of anthroposophy in the world.
Although anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner have appeared in newspapers in the US over the last century (including New York Times articles on Waldorf education, the 1921 riot in Munich, even the fire that destroyed the First Goetheanum), the December conference did not appear in any major US papers or media outlets. Despite this lack of notice, the conference was wonderful for Society members in the US—to have so many from the Goetheanum and School for Spiritual Science joining the conference, demonstrating the deep scholarship and substantial research being carried out. The conference has subsequently given rise to many conversation groups throughout the anthroposophical movement in the US and continues to inspire ideas toward the future.
More 100 Years Rudolf Steiner, Harvard Divinity School Program for the Evolution of Spirituality
Video 100 Years Rudolf Steiner Conference Interview Sessions
Title image James Room East after a panel presentation: conference organizer Henry Holland in conversation with a participant. Photo: Garret Harkawik
Footnotes
- Henry Holland and Aaron French, “Biography in the Mirrors of the Biographers, or Writing the Life of Rudolf Steiner: Empirical Facts, Polemical Insinuations, and Imaginative Insights,” opening keynote at 100 Years Rudolf Steiner, Harvard Divinity School, December 2025.
