Episode #51: Philip Francis - Seguinland Institute, The Good Life Gap Year, Maine

MICROCOLLEGE: The Thoreau College Podcast

Philip Francis is the Director and Co-Founder of the Seguinland Institute, an innovative gap year program provider located in beautiful Georgetown, Maine. Philip is a native son of the region, where his parents settled to become homesteaders under the influence of Scott and Helen Nearing, authors of the early 20th century back-to-the-land classic Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World. Today, Philip and his wife, co-founder Marsha Dunn, share this powerful legacy at the Seguinland Institute with gap year students through the "Good Life Gap Semester" and other programs hosted on their spectacular forest campus dotted with cabins and treehouses, animated by the heartbeat of the tides that flood the tidal salt marshes twice each day.

Philip is a scholar of art and religion with a PhD from the Harvard Divinity School. He completed a postdoc at UPenn and professorships at Carleton College and Manhattan College before returning to his home state as Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at UMaine Farmington. His book, When Art Disrupts Religion, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

The Seguinland Institute is an important leader within the microcollege movement and a close collaborator with Thoreau College under the auspices of Springboard, a wonderful new nonprofit supporting education of this kind, which hosted a convening of educators at Seguinland in June 2023.

Seguinland Institute: https://www.seguinlandinstitute.org/

When Art Disrupts Religion: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/when-art-disrupts-religion-9780190279769?cc=us&lang=en&

Springboard: https://www.springboardlife.org/

Thoreau College: https://thoreaucollege.org/

Driftless Folk School: https://www.driftlessfolkschool.org/

Join the Microcollege Movement!: https://www.hylo.com/groups/microcollege-network