I've posted articles in my blogs about new monasticism in the past, for example at Notes from underground: Urban monasticism and Notes from underground: Abandoned places of empire. You can find others by typing "new monasticism" in the search box of this blog or my other one.

Most of them haven't attracted any relevant comments, and most of the comments have been inane or off topic. Roger Saner, who is about to join a new monastic community, bewails the scarcity of interesting and intelligent comments in Emerging Africa.

Now comes an interesting article that develops one of the themes that I mentioned in some of my blog posts on the topic -- that one of the pioneers of new monasticism, or urban monasticism, was Mother Maria Skobtsova. Let's hope some intelligent conversation emerges from that one!

This last weekend has been a historic occasion for Orthodoxy in Southern Africa, with the first diocesan youth conference and the tonsuring of the first South African monk in South Africa by His Beatitude Theodoros, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria.

The youth conference was arranged with the blessing of Archbishop Seraphim, and began began on Thursday 7 December, and we had been expecting about 20 people aged between 15 and 30, and got a whole lot of extras, most of them outside the age limits.

We slept at the site of the St Nektarius and St Nicholas monastery, though there are not actually any monks there. There is a farmhouse there, which had two small bedrooms (far too small for the extra people who came), and a larger room suitable for meetings. We slept on the carpeted floors.

On the Friday morning we had three real monks visit and tell us about the monastic life -- Father Pantelejmon from Black River monastery in Serbia, and Father Naum of Sopochani Monastery in Serbia, and Brother Matthew the novice, a South African who was soon to be tonsured as Monk Seraphim. The next speaker was Father Mircea, who spoke on confession, and, apparently as a result of this, nearly all those present went to confession on Saturday night.


Members of the youth conference with monks Pantelejmon and Naum and novice Brother Matthew, in the beautiful surroundings of Leeuwenkloof, west of Pretoria

We structured the conference as a kind of mini-monastic experience, with the First, Third, Sixth and Ninth Hours read through the day, often by the young people at the conference. The Hours were mostly in English, though we used North Sotho, Zulu and Greek as well, to show the multicultural nature of Orthodoxy.

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On Sunday morning the Patriarch arrived again and in a long service there was the churching of one of the members of our Mamelodi youth group, Theodora Ramohlale, and the tonsuring of the novice Brother Matthew as Monk Seraphim, and his ordination to the diaconate by the Patriarch.
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We hope that there will be more youth conferences in future, and that more of the parishes in the Archdiocese will be represented in future. Perhaps from them there will be young people called to the ordained ministry and the monastic life.


The newly-tonured Hierodeacon Seraphim with Pope Theodoros II

There have been Orthodox monks working in South Africa before, but they have usually worked alone as parish priests and have come from overseas. There have also been several South Africans who have gone overseas to join monasteries, but this has not led to a flourishing of the monastic life in South Africa; monasticism has remained an exotic plant. So the tonsuring of Hierodeacon Seraphim marks a new stage in the development of what we hope will be an indigenous Southern African monasticism.

frsimon referred people to my LJ for comments on the spin-offs of the Jack Straw veil controversy. But my comments are more general ones about dressing counterculturally, and were in my other blog Notes from underground: The values of liberal democracy.

But since I'm creating a link to it here, I'll also try an experiment with the Technorati tags to see if they work from here, since they certainly don't seem to work over there.

Tags: Orthodox monasticism, fools for Christ, Christianity & culture, religious persecution, Pilgrims of the Absolute, liberalism, religion and society, religion and society

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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