Christian Intentional Communities

Amidst the myriad of flaws and lacunae (enumerated here) in Rod Dreher's little book, none is more fatal than its romanticization of local community. As I noted in 2015, I have some personal experience, over more than a decade, of a variety of forms of Christian intentional communities in several places and the many difficulties they experience, especially when it comes to open, honest, charitable acknowledgement, let alone resolution, of internal conflicts. They can, to be sure, offer wonderful gifts, as I experienced from my community after I very nearly died in 1996 when I was hit by a bus in Ottawa while riding my bike. It took me nearly a year to recover--three months in hospital, and six months learning to walk again--and during that time I had wonderful support from my community. But I also saw first-hand, there and in other communities, how Christians are tempted to ignore serious problems, thereby making them much worse.

We have not had, until now, a lot of research into Christian intentional communities. But a new book looks sure to begin the overdue process of filling in some gaps about how such communities are structured and function: Religious Vitality in Christian Intentional Communities: A Comparative Ethnographic Study by Mark Killian (Lexington Books, 2017), 226pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Through ethnographic research, Killian examines vitality in Philadelphia and Berea, two Christian Intentional Communities whose participants live in close proximity with one another to achieve religious values. Pulling from Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration, Killian argues that the vitality of both communities cannot be reduced to deterministic structural, individual, or organizational causes. Rather, vitality in these communities is affected by all of these causes in relationship to one another. In other words, it’s not that each explanation “matters” (e.g., social structures matter, organizational behaviors matter, individual religious choices matter), but that these explanations matter to each other (e.g., social structures matter to individual choices, individual choices matter to organizational behaviors, and social structures matter to organizational choices, etc.). To make this argument, Killian develops the idea of the vitality nexus—the interconnected relationship between the various explanations of religious vitality.

Turning Off Technology

As I noted recently, questions about technology and community have been longstanding preoccupations of mine. I just recently finished a book published in 2004 that narrates a winsome journey of a young couple from Yale and MIT who ended up living with, and largely like, Amish for a year: Eric Brende, Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. The author ends with a few suggestions on how to live with technology, and to live with less technology. For those Eastern and other Christians interested in this kind of life, a life that seems at heart more monastic than most of us lead, you will find this an interesting book--very descriptive, and helpfully non-prescriptive.

I read this book in one afternoon, and it is charmingly written, not least because it is free from any sanctimonious preaching or hectoring. It documents a fascinating year living among the Amish, and an increasing sense of wanting to do that permanently. But in the end several insurmountable hurdles presented themselves and Eric and his wife Mary left. But they carried with them many lessons from the "Minimites," as they called their low-tech neighbors, which they continue to live out today in a suburb of St. Louis. The neighborhood near St. Louis where they have settled seems to follow the pattern for flourishing outlined by Jane Jacobs in her landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here many things are within walking or cycling distance, and this is something I wish we would see in more large cities.

I read Jacobs' book as an undergraduate in an introductory course on ethics. At first, I couldn't figure out what the hell the professor, Kenneth Melchin, was doing by having us read a book about urban planning in an ethics course taught by a theology department.

We also read another equally baffling choice, viz., Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics, most of which I didn't understand at the time, but which has come back to me more and more over the years, not least its memorable notion of the "immantization of the eschaton." Both books not only taught valuable lessons in themselves, but their selection in an ethics course was a piece of pedagogical brilliance: they helped me overcome once and for all what Alasdair MacIntyre sees as one of the most pernicious traps of modernity: the blindness we have to moral questions, which are in fact shot through all of life, and not discreetly delimited into tight departments. Ever since, I have answered in the affirmative MacIntyre's question "Does Applied Ethics Rest Upon a Mistake?"

For those who are interested,the Catholic writer John Zmirak interviews Brende here. A St. Louis TV station interviewed him and his wife as you can see here:

Amish, Hippies, and the Rest of Us

I have for some time been deeply interested in the Amish, among whom I live in northern Indiana, which has the third-largest population of Amish in the country.We buy all our vegetables from a nearby Amish market, and much else from another Amish store. Last week I watched this interesting PBS documentary on them. I've read a number of studies about the Amish, including John Hostetler's Amish Society; Carol Highsmith and Ted Landphair, The Amish: A Photographic Tour; and Leslie Kelly, America's Amish Country II.

What interests me is not their theology, nor their largely non-sacramental and aliturgical life, none of which I could accept. (At risk of pressing on them categories they do not recognize, I would be inclined to say that their manner of life, especially their biblically grounded stewardship of the earth, has a deeply "sacramental" quality to it in a way that Alexander Schmemann described very well.) Instead, what interests me is precisely their manner of living: small, local, agrarian, and with a constant wariness about how new technology can damage their families and communities. And yet, given the strictures on their life, they flourish: recent studies indicate that they have large families and an extremely high rate of retention (I've seen numbers above 90%) of their youth, which no Christian church anywhere on the planet comes close to replicating. In speaking of the Amish I am not, I hope, indulging in any kind of romanticism or contrarianism; I am certainly not a Luddite. I know it is a besetting sin of too many Eastern Christians, and so I try to keep a firm check on any impulse towards nostalgia for a "simpler" or "better" past that never was.

But the quiet example of the Amish raises questions for me that I have long considered about the globalized world in which we live--ecological questions, sociopolitical questions, economic questions, and ultimately philosophical and theological questions. These are questions that first came to me in the late 1990s when I was writing an MA thesis on Alasdair MacIntyre, whose most influential book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, first published in 1981, ends with a famous passage about the similarities (but also differences) between the collapse of the West-Roman Empire into the Dark Ages, and the "new dark ages which are already upon us." In such a context, MacIntyre said, we are awaiting "a new--and doubtless very different--Saint Benedict." That language has led some, e.g., the Orthodox blogger Rod Dreher, whom I read daily with great interest, to speak of a "Benedictine option" for Christians today--looking at new forms of community, new ways of living, in our present circumstances.

Some years ago Dreher wrote a book I read with relish, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots. (Dreher also has a new book out this year, to which I will attend later. I hope also to interview him about it.)

If, following Paul Evdokimov, all Christians are called to a life of "interiorized monasticism," how possible is that in the world in which most of us live today? Can the silence and contemplation, the prayer and solitude, which are necessary components of any monasticism worthy of the name, be lived today when we are surrounded by so much technology? Should we not, Amish-like, look more critically on our phones, tablets, computers, and cars? What would a new, and doubtless very different, monasticism look like? How can we be more like the Amish? How can the vision of a "crunchy" conservatism be lived on more than an individual "boutique" basis? Are Christians of our time called to live differently in intentional communities? (Catholics like this family would seem to think so. In 2006, I spent a few days with some friends who were then part of the City of the Lord, a Catholic intentional community in Phoenix. There was much there that was attractive, but the charismatic worship was deeply repellent.)

I have no answers to these questions, but continue to think about them. I hope my thinking will be aided by the recent publication of a book from Paraclete Press, which has published a number of good works in Eastern Christianity, monasticism, and much else besides: David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus (Paraclete Press, 2012).

About this book, which was brought to my attention by my good friend, Fr. Jason Charron, the publisher tells us:

In the 21st century, a new generation of Spirit-energized people are searching for a new—yet ancient—way of life together. David Janzen, a friend of the New Monasticism movement with four decades of personal communal experience, has visited scores of communities, both old and new. The Intentional Christian Community Handbook shares his wisdom, as well as the experience of intentional Christian communities across North America over the last half century.