Intentional Individuals: Growing Up in Radical Christian Communities

the community, whether by moving back and forth between community life and a more conventional lifestyle, by living in a slightly different sort of community, by serving as an advisor to the community, or simply by residing nearby.The children of intentional community, in short, are intentional individuals who live with one foot in the community movement and one foot in the larger society.As such, they are uniquely poised to build bridges between the two worlds.* * * I arrived at this thesis after talking to several people who grew up in the Catholic Worker and Camphill community movements, and to parents who are currently raising children in those movements.Since this is, to my knowledge, the first comparative study of the Catholic Worker and Camphill, it may help to offer a little background, both about these movements and about my own interest in them.Both movements have their roots in the global economic and social crisis of the 1930s.The Catholic Worker was founded by Dorothy Day, a radical journalist who had converted to Catholicism in part because she saw it as the church of the poor, and the French philosopher Peter Maurin.Drawing on Catholic social teaching, Day and Maurin hoped to "create a new society within the shell of the old" by forming urban "houses of hospitality" for the homeless and rural farming cooperatives.1 The Camphill movement was founded by Karl König, an Austrian pediatrician and follower of the Christian esoteric philosopher Rudolf Steiner.(Steiner's "spiritual science," known as Anthroposophy, also provides the basis for Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and a network of churches known simply as the Christian Community.)König devoted his life to "curative education" for children and "social therapy" for adults with disabilities, and both this vocation and his Jewish ethnicity soon forced him to flee the Nazis.With a cluster of other refugees, he formed the first Camphill at an estate in Scotland, and since then the movement has spread throughout Europe and North America, with a few communities in Africa and India.Sharing life with people with disabilities remains the central task of all Camphills, but König understood the movement more broadly as a new social order called to restore the true European ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. 2 At least within the United States, both movements were re-shaped by the countercultural movements of the 1960s.The Catholic Worker movement grew rapidly during the Vietnam War, and many Workers embraced the draft card burning and liturgical acts of civil disobedience associated with the Berrigan brothers.(Jonah House, the Baltimore community founded by Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister, is not officially a Worker, but for the purposes of this paper I shall consider it as such, since many contemporary Workers have close personal connections to the Berrigans.)Camphill first came to the United States in 1961, and it quickly