Communities #190
Spring 2021
Note: You can order a copy of this issue here.
This issue explores various interpretations of the theme Faith in Community. Some authors address their personal faith in intentional community itself, and how their life experiences have led them to affirm or question that faith. Others discuss the benefits and challenges of living in religious faith-based communities. And other authors blend pragmatic or secular perspectives with spiritual elements as they contemplate the theme and share their stories.
FAITH IN COMMUNITY
Letters
News from Our Partners
Storytelling and Catching by Looby Macnamara
Storytelling is not just a part of our culture; it defines our culture and makes it visible. Through our stories we shift our culture. Permaculture, ecovillage, and community designs are stories we are creating in the world.
Ducks as a Symbol of Letting Go by Andrew McLean
These half-inch-high morsels of surprise and mild amusement are more than a silly little mystery on a small community in Australia. These ducks have started to represent for me the leap of faith that is required to start a community.
Faith in the Experiment by Lee Warren
Time and experience have turned blind faith into something more real and embodied. This deeper sense of knowing has been borne not from the communities movement getting better, although it has, but frankly from the world getting even more insane.
Pigs and a Broken Leg in a Multifaith Community by Joyce Bressler
I can’t say whether it was our religious beliefs or our human bonding, working and living together with common goals, that helped us reach this level of caring for each other. What I do know is that we grew together.
“Spirit Is the Guest and the Body Is the Home”: Faith and the Brotherhood of the Spirit Community by Daniel A. Brown
We were convinced our house rock band, “Spirit in Flesh,” would become more popular than the Beatles and thus, save the world. Our friends and family members thought we were stark raving mad. Fifty years later, most of our supposedly wild beliefs are commonplace—except that one.
The Hermitage as Shared Spirituality by Johannes Zinzendorf
We find that the idea of committing one’s life to a shared spiritual ideal is a difficult sell in these days of DIY religion when people, quite rightly, want to find and follow their own path.
Coming Into Unity by Blue Evening Star
Many years after we started, we still live with the many challenges of being in a spiritually-based community within the larger dominant culture of materialistic values.
From India to Nepal to Northern California: Beyond the “Dream” of Village by Ahkua Huling
My “faith in community” is not really a faith, but a knowing. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and I’ve felt it in my body, up there in the mountain villages and in my own community.
My Faith in Communities by Joan McVilly
My larger community is a series of interconnecting “intentional” communities and this is truly where my faith in community lies.
Keeping the Faith in a Forming Cohousing Community; Or: Why I keep going on this seemingly endless journey by Jennie Lindberg
What motivates me to continue working on our forming community and helps me have faith in the process is wondering how it will all turn out.
Leaning into Vulnerability by Teri Lynn Grunthaner
How do we begin to soften our defenses so as to tend to the precious needs beneath our pain? How do we learn to trust our belonging—to our community, to our planet, to ourselves—so as to stay grounded through the unsettling winds of conflict?
How Can You Know in Advance about Your New Community? by Diana Leafe Christian
As an activist in the communities movement for the last 30 years, I know abusive communities are rare. We can have faith in community living—and faith in our own new community—if we choose wisely by researching communities carefully and thoroughly beforehand.
The Sharp Rocks: The Perils of Individual Ownership in Aspiring “Egalitarian” Communities by Anonymous
My former community mates had not only coerced me to sell my house under duress, and for less than market value, but now were going around town saying that I’d “swindled” $50k from Greenville.
My Life in Co-operatives by Andrew Moore
I can still quote my family’s Co-operative Society membership number from over 50 years ago, 1141585. And my final co-operative experience I hope will be with Co-operative Funeral Services.
Camphill’s Evolution by Rick Mitchell
Exploring spirituality and disability in the evolving Camphill Village communal movement, Dan McKanan’s Camphill and the Future is thorough, thoughtful, and honest about Camphill’s current challenges.
Camphill and the Future: Another Look by Crystal Byrd Farmer
Communities that operate on an isolationist model of moral superiority will not grow as fast as those that recognize the interrelatedness of the entire world and focus on inclusion of all forms of diversity. Camphill has elements of both types, reasons for both caution and hope.
Notes to and from the Editor: Testing the Faith by Chris Roth
What happens when “group mind” becomes a stampede of self-reinforcing ideas, straying far from core values and “collective intelligence”? A communitarian questions everything.
DIGITAL SUPPLEMENT (available at gen-us.net/190.1; also included in digital issue):
The Queen, the Gardener, and Me: Reflections on Community-Forming Processes by Elizabeth Barr
Experience shows that ideas about group dynamics and cooperative living, and the skills for developing community, are transferable to groups of all sizes, in different types of places, whether temporary or permanent, old or new.
Community Events: The “We” of “Me” by Greg Sherwin
“Me” and “we” energies can fully merge in service to the highest good. The question is: What standards of community engagement are we willing to personally and collectively commit to?
Cultivating Community in the Neighborhood: Life Project 4 Youth by Camille Bru
Reaching out to strengthen neighborhood connections to help excluded young adults may not change the whole world, but it may change one person’s world, and that’s why we catalysts love what we do.
College-Based Senior Cohousing: An Idea Whose Time Has Come by Charles Durrett and Bernice Gonzalez
College and university towns are ideal locations for alumni senior cohousing, a model which promotes active lifestyles, encourages continuous learning, and empowers residents.