Recent stories
Two recent stories in national newspapers offer different perspectives on what’s happening in new monastic communities. For a description of the movement by a scholar of American religion, see Molly Worthen’s piece from the Boston Globe:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/02/03/the_unexpected_monks
For an up close look at the day-to-day challenges of a community in its first year, see Stephanie Simon’s piece from the L.A. Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-monk26jan26,1,7718645.story?track=crosspromo
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove has written an introduction to new monasticism, especially paying attention to what new monasticism means for the church–and why new communities need the church. You can help get the word out about the book by pre-ordering a copy now:
http://www.amazon.com/New-Monasticism-What-Todays-Church/dp/1587432242
School for Conversion: Updated Calendar for 2008
If you’d like to be part of a School for Conversion event in 2008, a fresh list of locations and dates is now online at:
http://newmonasticism.org
As a matter of fact, the whole www.newmonasticism.org site has been overhauled. Check out new descriptions of SFC Latin America, new courses, links to community of communities and forthcoming books. Let us know what you think–and what else you’d like to see.
New Monastic Library Series
In partnership with Wipf and Stock Publishers, School for Conversion announces its New Monastic Library Series. For over a millennium, if a Christian wanted to read theology, practice Christian spirituality, or study the Bible, she went to the monastery to do so. There people who inhabited the tradition and prayed the prayers of the church also copied manuscripts and offered fresh reflections about living the gospel in a new time. Two thousand years after the birth of the church, there is a new monastic movement stirring in North America. In keeping with ancient tradition, new monastics study the classics of Christian reflection and are beginning to offer some reflections for a new time. The New Monastic Library Series exists to share reflections from new ! monastics and to print classic monastic resources unavailable elsewhere. To see books in the series, visit:
http://wipfandstock.com/browse/series/New%20Monastic%20Library:%20Resources%20for%20Radical%20Discipleship
About Paul Dekar’s new book, Community of the Transfiguration: The Journey of a New Monastic Community, Phyllis Tickle writes in her foreword: “What Dekar has managed to do here is tell his own story, a monastery’s story, and a movement’s story in such a way as to make them all of one piece. Like layers of a well-rendered landscape, each gives depth and texture to the other, each lends grace to the other… the news is of other Christians and their ways of devotion, of other winds of the Spirit blowing across our times, and of other witnesses for whose encouragement we can pray. May each of us find in all those things reason to rejoice as well as a passion and devotion by which to measure and amend our own.”
To read more or order a copy of Dekar’s Community of the Transfiguration, visit:
http://wipfandstock.com/store/Community_of_the_Transfiguration_The_Journey_of_a_New_Monastic_Community