Tim Miller
From Ecovillages
Tim Miller, Ph.D., a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, has long been a scholar and activist in the intentional communities movement in the US and abroad. He has been involved in the Communal Studies Association (US) and Utopian Studies Society (Europe), and he is Past President of the International Communal Studies Association (Israel).
Tim is author of four books on intentional communities and the counterculture: The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse University Press, 1999); The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America: Volume One, 1900-1960 (Syracuse University Press, 1998); The Hippies and American Values (University of Tennessee Press, 1991), and American Communes, 1860-1960: A Bibliography (Garland Publishing Company, 1990).
He was editor of America's Alternative Religions (SUNY, 1995) and When Prophets Die: The Postcharismatic Fate of New Religious Movements (SUNY Press, 1991).
Tim has written articles and book reviews for academic publications as well as for Communities magazine. As Guest Editor of the Fall, 1995 “Intentional Communities and ‘Cults’” issue of Communities magazine, he observed that most people who use the term “cult” don’t in fact have evidence that the group is a destructive organization that hurts its members, but rather they don’t like, don’t agree with, or don’t understand the group’s beliefs and practices. And if an intentional community seems to be doing something negative or unethical, he asked that we describe their actions specifically (and if needed, call the authorities), rather than referring to the community as a “cult,” since using this term tends to slur all intentional communities by implication.
