Taoist Dream Trippers Trek through China

Today, Mitchell interviews the authors of Dream Trippers, a book about the series of trips to China sponsored by American Taoist teacher, Michael Winn. Michael is a long-time friend of Mitchell's and Mitchell has been on a couple of the Dream Trips in China with Michael doing T'ai-Chi on the mountaintops. Dr. David A. Palmer is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Department of Sociology and Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, at the University of Hong Kong. After completing his Ph.D. in the Anthropology of Religion at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, he was the Eileen Barker Fellow in Religion and Contemporary Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and, from 2004 to 2008, director of the Hong Kong Centre of the French School of Asian Studies (Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient). His books include the award-winning Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (Columbia University Press, 2007); The Religious Question in Modern China (co-authored with Vincent Goossaert, University of Chicago Press, 2011; awarded the Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies); and Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (co-authored with Elijah Siegler,  Dr. Elijah Siegler is a Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He has degrees from Harvard University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has published an introductory textbook on New Religious Movements, and articles about religion in film and television, on American Daoism, and on religious studies pedagogy. He recently edited Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order (Baylor University Press, 2016) and co-wrote, with David Palmer, Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Culture.