What is life like in contemporary American communes? How do families fit into communal life? What are communal families, and what impact do families have on how communes are run and how they develop? As the only contemporary exploration of communal families, this book investigates the assumptions that scholars and others have made regarding the status of the family within communes, and debunks current myths about communes and communal families. While some groups are predisposed to families, other communal groups become replacements or substitutes for the nuclear family. William L. Smith investigates a variety of practices, including monogamy, polygamy, pantagamy, and celibacy, as implemented by intentional communities in dealing with family life. Drawing on the history of communes in the United States, Smith discusses various communal groups, such as the Shakers, the Mormons, the Oneida Community, the Amana Colonies, as well as contemporary rural and urban communal groups such as Twin Oaks, Jesus People USA, and the Hutterites.

Families and Communes provides students and researchers with an intriguing study of a unique social group that is often overlooked.

From the Shakers to the Branch Davidians, America's communal utopians have captured the popular imagination. Seventeen original essays here demonstrate the relevance of such groups to the mainstream of American social, religious, and economic life. The contributors examine the beliefs and practices of the most prominent utopian communities founded before 1965, including the long-overlooked Catholic monastic communities and Jewish agricultural colonies. Also featured are the Ephrata Baptists, Moravians, Shakers, Harmonists, Hutterites, Inspirationists of Amana, Mormons, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, Janssonists, Theosophists, Cyrus Teed's Koreshans, and Father Divine's Peace Mission. Based on a new conceptual framework known as developmental communalism, the book examines these utopian movements throughout the course of their development--before, during, and after their communal period. Each chapter includes a brief chronology, giving basic information about the group discussed. An appendix presents the most complete list of American utopian communities ever published. The contributors are Jonathan G. Andelson, Karl J. R. Arndt, Pearl W. Bartelt, Priscilla J. Brewer, Donald F. Durnbaugh, Lawrence Foster, Carl J. Guarneri, Robert V. Hine, Gertrude E. Huntington, James E. Landing, Dean L. May, Lawrence J. McCrank, J. Gordon Melton, Donald E. Pitzer, Robert P. Sutton, Jon Wagner, and Robert S. Weisbrot. |Offering the first comprehensive history of Atlanta race relations, Ronald Bayor discusses the impact of racial bias on physical and institutional development of the city from the end of the Civil War through the mayorship of Andrew Young in the 1980s. Bayor explores frequently ignored policy issues through the lens of race--including hospital care, highway placement and development, police and fire services, schools, and park use, as well as housing patterns and employment.

Surprising. Provocative. Honest.
For "Unveiled," reporter Cheryl Reed interviewed more than 300 nuns of diverse beliefs, lifestyles, and orders. She lived and prayed with them, witnessed their vows, mourned and celebrated with them, and asked questions no one had ever dared before: about love and sex, life and death, faith and joy, and loss and regret. In the process, Reed would discover more about motherhood, relationships, faith, and feminism than she ever gleaned from the outside world.

This volume presents a critical edition of three Latin monastic texts from late antiquity along with a scholarly introduction. Modeled after predecessors from Egyptian monasticism, Vita Pachomii describes the life and monastic rules of a fictional Desert Father. The Regula Donati and the anonymous Fragmentum Regulae were both designed for nunneries. Donat s rules in particular transmit a complex tradition of early monastic rules"

Buddhist Monks and Business Matters is the second in a series of collected essays by one of the today's most distinguished scholars of Indian Buddhism. In these articles, all save one published in various places from 1994 through 2001, Gregory Schopen once again displays the erudition and originality that have contributed to a major shift in the way that Indian Buddhism is perceived, understood, and studied.