Part 3 in a series. Read Part 1.

Intentional communities

In 1955, James Luther Adams published an article titled “Notes on the Study of Gould Farm,” a short piece on an intentional community in western Massachusetts (Gould Farm is no longer an intentional community and now houses a rehabilitation program for mentally ill adults). In his laudatory description of the community at Gould Farm, Adams could be talking about one of the “new monasteries” that are cropping up today:

For over forty years Gould Farm has been that unique thing which today is called an “intentional community”; it is a deliberately formed community in which people live together sharing, receiving, and incarnating religious visions. Adams, ed. Engels (1986), 254

As Adams describes Gould Farm, we can imagine how his words could possibly apply (although in a less intense manner) to certain liberal churches:

Gould Farm is a fellowship not only for the inner “family” of members who maintain the community. It is open to “outsiders,” to people who in distress of mind or spirit wish for a time to participate in a community of affection that gives renewed meaning and depth to life. Gould Farm, in short, is a therapeutic community. It does not live merely for itself, as many intentional communities have done. It is a “self-transcending” community. To all sorts of people it offers healing, the healing that can only emerge, as William Gould believed and showed, in the atmosphere of harmony and mutual aid which characterizes the true family. The Farm has been a haven not only for those who in sickness of spirit desperately needed the fellowship that is new life but also for those who, like the many refugees from Europe of the past two decades, needed a place in which to get new bearings and a new start in a strange land. Adams, ed. Engels (1986), 255

Adams may well be excessively laudatory in his article on Gould Farm; elsewhere he is quite clear about the pathologies of voluntary associations, and intentional residential communities seem to be prone to more than their share of pathologies. Nevertheless, he description identifies several characteristics we should look for in intentional religious communities:

• the community is deliberately formed and maintained
• in the community, people share and receive
• the community incarnates religious visions
• the community does not live merely for itself; it is self-transcending
• there is an inner circle or “family” and…
• others who need to be part of a community of affection for a time are also welcome
• healing takes place in the community
• the community can serve as a refuge

While Adams is specifically talking about a residential community in this article, in practice these characteristics may also apply to certain kinds of non-residential intentional communities. There may be some liberal churches which can boast of all these characteristics; these would be true intentional communities, albeit non-residential communities. Indeed, I would argue that these characteristics should be part of the ideal for a certain kind of liberal church.

Next: Kinds of liberal churches

Part 1 in a series

Back in 1981, the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre published After Virtue, in which he claimed that moral theory since the Enlightenment doesn’t work. In ancient Western culture, thinkers such as Aristotle presumed that human lives were lived towards some end; but this idea was abandoned by Western thinkers during the Renaissance. As a result, MacIntyre claimed, Western moral theories from the Enlightenment on simply don’t make sense. So this is basically one of those postmodern books that says the Enlightenment project has failed.

This raises the difficult question: How do we live a virtuous life, after it has become obvious that Enlightenment morality does not teach us how to lead a virtuous life? Nietzsche answered the same basic question by telling us that we should go back to the aristocracy of Homeric Greece — which would imply that most of us would wind up as slaves. MacIntyre says, in part, that we should go back to the ethics of Aristotle; but on a more practical level, MacIntyre calls for some kind of new monasticism:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history [e.g., of late Rome] occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of the imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead — often not recognizing fully what they were doing — was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a God, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict. After Virture, 263

I vividly remember sitting in my senior philosophy seminar listening to Richard J. Bernstein excoriate MacIntyre on this point: “He wants us to go back into monasteries! That’s the whole point of this book!” As a leftist, Bernstein obviously wanted us impressionable college students to feel compelled to get directly involved in political process, and in changing the world through direct action; equally obviously, Bernstein thought that any kind of monastery would lead to passivism and quietism. Continue reading →