New Monasticism: What it has to say to today's church, and: Finding Happiness: Monastic steps for a fulfilling life (review)

These two books provide a fascinating glimpse into the applications of Christian spirituality in the postmodern world. I highly recommend them both, but for different reasons and possibly different audiences. Both are influenced by the monastic tradition (Jamison more than Wilson-Hartgrove; more on this later). Both are keenly aware of movements of popular spirituality and religiosity. Both want to suggest that an immersion in the spiritual practices of the Church (or at least the Western church) are salutary, and indeed even therapeutic for our postmodern condition. And both are engaging and well-written.

I begin with New Monasticism, which I would describe as exemplifying exactly what Benedict meant in his Rule when he wrote that it was important to listen to the young. Wilson-Hartgrove is a late-twentysomething adult, a graduate of Duke Divinity School, where he was influenced by Stanley Hauerwas. He and his wife traveled to Iraq shortly before the US bombing began there, and wrote his first book about that experience, which led them both to a conversion to the "new monasticism" movement. Wilson-Hartgrove's smooth writing style endears him to the reader, allowing him or her a glimpse into a very intentional, biblical, historically-grounded, and morally aware practice of Christian faith in community.

That community is called Rutba House—named after the Iraqi town that offered medical aid to them during their sojourn there. It is a community with a particular interest in addressing the legacy of racism; Wilson-Hartgrove writes, reflecting in particular on Hurricane Katrina, that "when the pressure is on, the blood of our racial identity runs thicker than the water of our baptism" (p. 16). The concerns of that new monastic community give a clue to the theological/political/spiritual concerns that animate the movement: redressing social wrongs through intentional community rooted in a deep and often prophetic Biblical spirituality.

The purist in me observes a point that is more semantic than substantive: this is not monasticism. It is rather, to use a phrase that became common among communities that left the monasteries, like the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits, "contemplation in action." Wilson-Hartgrove offers a short overview of spiritual movements in the church, focusing on the origins of monasticism with Anthony of Egypt and tracing its growth in the wake of Benedict. But he also focuses on the emergence of the Franciscans, the Radical Reformation of the Anabaptists, the modern examples of the Bruderhof and the Catholic Worker. His real interest, I think, is less monasticism per se, and more the radical kind of commitment to the Christian life exemplified by new movements in the church over its history. New monasticism, as far as I can judge, aspires to a critique of lax spirituality (Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace") the way that desert monasticism was a critique of empire; Franciscanism was a critique of a new cash economy; the Bruderhof and Catholic Worker movements are critiques of fascism and capitalism. The common feature is that new monasticism seeks to share with these other movements a radical discipleship, in the sense of eschewing participation in the structural/social sins endemic in contemporary American life: not only racism, but also individualism, economic disparity, and participation in war-making.

New monastics—who, I would (gently) suggest, are better called New contemplatives in action—have an active spirituality of engagement with the world. As I read through Wilson-Hartgrove's chapters, I was mindful of a line that Abbot Jamison wrote in his book. Reflecting on the monastic tendency toward acedia, he observed that the desert fathers recognized this demon when a monk started becoming less concerned with the interior life and more concerned with action in the world. "As the discipline of the monastic life becomes distasteful, so...