Some Protestants have been talking a lot recently about a "new monasticism" and this month a group of us have been havinfg a synchroblog on the topic -- posting blogs on the same day on the same general theme.

If you are interested you can find my contribution at Treasures old and new, with links to the posts by the other contributors.

Though the idea is new to many of those who are now discussing it, and trying to practise it, it actually has quite a long history. Even today there are old relics like me who can remember, with old hippie nostalgia, the Christian (and other) communes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were Cathoplic groups like the Catholic Worker communities and The Grail, and Protestant ones as well.

I recently wrote something in orthodoxy about urban monasticism and noted that there was an urban monks tribe for bringing together people who are interested in this phenomenon. In that post I was specifically interested in Orthodox Christian manifestations of the phenomenon, but I thought it might be useful to bring together some other other manifestations.

I found only one other person on LiveJournal who listed urban monasticism as an interest, markredmond, but it is also known under other names.

There is a Protestant group that speaks of the "new monasticism", for example, and the Catholic Worker Movement founded by Dorothy Day has over 185 communities worldwide.

There is also an indirect Orthodox connection in a book written by Michael Harper, A new way of living, about communities that developed in an Episcopal (Anglican) parish in Texas, USA, though it appears that these communities no longer exist. Michael Harper is now an Orthodox priest in Britain, though he was not Orthodox at the time he wrote the book. There is also a mention of this in the Titus on line blog.

It seems that charismatic intentional communities in Western churches flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, but then died out, though there are signs of a revival of interest -- or is this just old hippie nostalgia?

My own view is that whether one calls this urban monasticism or new monasticism or anything else, at least in the Orthodox world it needs a solid foundation in traditional Orthodox monasticism.
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