"Most intentional communities are organized around a particular religion or common spiritual practice."While it's true that many groups have a spiritual focus--and most of the better-known historical communities did, such as Amana and Oneida, and even New Harmony here in Indiana--according to the 1995 addition of the Fellowship for Intentional Communities' Directory of Communities, of the 540 North American communities listed, 65% were secular or didn't specify, while only 35% were explicitly spiritual or religious.
Raccoon Creek does not have a spiritual focus, at least not in the normal sense. There is a strong respect for all life shared by all of our participants, and a self-imposed mandate to live lightly on the earth.
If anyone has more current statistics, please post them with a comment. An update to the directory was published in 2000 and another will be published this year.
2 comments:
It looks like your statistics are pretty up-to-date... note, however, that the Communties Directory put out by FIC is an "opt-in" publication, only listing communities that choose to be listed, and find out about it and get community permission and act on it in time, so the %age spiritual/religious is probably even lower.
When I do a search at The Communities Directory website, I see that just 250 of 902 communities (noting the same bias, above) have a spiritual/religious path; when I limit it to communities using the cohousing model, just 12 of 192 have that box checked.
While a new growth area in the Cohousing movement is in Church-led projects, cohousing largely does not embrace a particular path... it's all about having the privacy to lead your own life and the community to support you in common. Of course, any community identifies common values, but they tend to the practical and down-to-earth.
Raines Cohen
boardmember
Cohousing Association of the United States (Coho/US)
P.S. It's good to see Raccoon Creek in the directory, and therefore now on the Cohousing Communities list. You've got a lot of recent activity here, I'm looking forward to reading more and sending more leads your way!
The removed post was an invitation to move this blog to another service. It had no relevance to the purpose of "Up the Creek..."
If one wants to contact the Raccoon Creek Community, send a message to our email address.
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