[1] Kurt Spellmeyer, Kankan Roshi, trained with Takabayashi Genki and Kangan Glenn Webb, founders of the Seattle Zen Center.

He is critical of both conservative elitists like Allan Bloom and self-professed "leftists" who claim an oppositional status while reinforcing class distinctions of the kind described by Pierre Bourdieu.

Although Spellmeyer's research has been influenced by sociologists like Bourdieu, Charles Derber, and others, he is particularly indebted to Barbara and John Ehrenreich's work on the rise of "new class"—the professional-managerial elite, including academics, who have become the core of the Democratic Party in the U.S., displacing a working-class constituency.

[7] In a review of Arts of Living, one critic said:[8] Not everyone who reads Spellmeyer's text will agree wholeheartedly; as John Brereton states in his blurb, it's "guaranteed to be controversial."

Even if one does not agree with parts or most of his arguments, Arts of Living, I believe, is an important read for every humanities scholar and teacher.Spellmeyer has also published articles on theories of composition/rhetoric, critical theory, and the sociology of knowledge and of academic institutions, in journals that include College English, College Composition and Communication, The Journal of Advanced Composition, Pedagogy, Transformations, and Religion and the Arts.