In this episode, Carmen chats with the Executive Director of the Winthrop House—a budding Christian Community located in eastern New Hampshire. Roger Tindall shares some helpful background on the Intentional Christian Community movement, as well as resources for those who want to dig deeper. Most importantly, he shares his own personal insights into building a community after years of trial and error.
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Additional Resources:
By Rod Dreher
Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party): Includes a discussion of conservative counterculturalism with some initial thoughts on the "Benedict Option" concept at the end of the book.
The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation: A discussion of why we lost the culture war and why intentional community is the best answer for our current situation.
Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents: His latest book deals with current events and the rise of "soft totalitarianism," which he compares with the "hard totalitarianism" of communist regimes, and shares some thoughts for countercultural Christians in a hostile environment.
Other Resources:
Building the Benedict Option by Leah Libresco. Offers insights on one group of millennials' attempt to build intentional community in an urban environment follow the principles of The Benedict Option.
Front Porch Republic: A hub for conservative localist intellectuals from different confessional backgrounds, including much discussion of intentional community.
Plough Magazine: A quarterly journal associated with the communal Bruderhof Movement that features articles from across confessional lines dealing with many topics related to intentional community.
Irresistible Revolution and other works by Shane Claiborne. A theologically orthodox but politically progressive take on the "New Monasticism" movement among Protestants, Claiborne nevertheless offers insights on the spiritual aspect of intentional community that more politically conservative Christians could learn from.
The Twelve Tribes communities offer a working model of a more strictly communal type of community living for those who don't share their particular theological convictions, and are very open to visitors: https://twelvetribes.org/
A WSJ feature on the Clear Creek community: https://www.wsj.com/articles/communities-built-on-faith-1487349471 A NYT feature on Doug Wilson and New Saint Andrew's: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30Christian-t.html An NPR feature on the Hyattsville, MD community: https://www.npr.org/2017/04/10/522714982/catholics-build-intentional-community-of-like-minded-believers
The Winthrop House website, which they hope to expand as we develop programming for the coming year: www.winthrophouse.org