Hi Tim and NtFs,
Thanks for this thread, and I guess this NtF email list is becoming both a way of generating Nontheist Friends' history, as well as exploring related questions - something seasoned Quakers seem to move into with time (although it would be great to keep this beautiful generative NtF email conversation going through the centuries "in the now" and as information technologies develop beyond the epistle and the email, for example). I think Friends enjoy exploring Quaker history quite a bit as well (although I continue to be interested in an ongoing way "in the valley of love and delight" from that old Shaker? hymn, "'Tis a gift to be simple" ... and am grateful these concepts found their way into Friendly song and also are making their way through time, beyond history).
In terms of "Where to post Quaker history question about communal living?", there were quite a few Quaker-attenders living in two communal houses (the Brooklyn Street house, near People's Food Co-op, and the Woodward Street house) in southeast Portland, Oregon, in the first half of the 1980s, most of whom were attending Reed College (e.g. see http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/06/pacific-hemlock-portland-oregon-reed.html) - and all of whom were bicycle riders.
As a child of the 1960s, with a vision for living in community, and with communal living "in the air" in the 1970s (my teen years), my experiences with Quaker communal houses probably began in the 1970s in Pittsburgh, PA, where there was a house owned, I think, by Pittsburgh Friends Meeting and which was a kind of commune (Walter Mead, who lived there - are you on this email list? I think RKC, also in Pgh, is still). One of my first girlfriends lived in this house as well.
From these Portland, Oregon, collective houses, some of us visited, and thought about living at, Alpha Farm http://members.pioneer.net/~alpha/index.htm on the Oregon Coast (west of Eugene, OR, along Deadwood Creek), which began as a kind of exodus from Quaker Philadelphia story around 1972, to set up a hippie commune and go back to the land on a farm, engaging Friends' principles and Quaker decision-making, but secularly (and it's still in operation, and welcomes visitors to share in their life to this day - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2014/02/red-elderberry-alpha-farm-quaker.html), as well as their earth-aware vision. It thus comes out of a similar tradition as NtFs, as I see it, and re a different kind of community, quite explicitly for communal living. Here's a related "communal living" blog post about 1960's informed west coast communities and communes to a Quaker friend in SF Friends Meeting who went to Stanford in the early 1970s - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2014/02/smoketree-flowers-hippie-communes.html.
After graduating from Reed College (in Religion and German) and leaving Portland, Oregon, (in 1987) I was still very interested in communal living, and communities, and found my way to Pendle Hill, a Quaker Center for Study and Contemplation, near Swarthmore College, SW of Philadelphia in a suburb (and also near Media, PA, where there was a partly Quaker-inspired break-in of a FBI office in "1971" - with a film of this name too - by the "Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Investigate_the_FBI - and partly the brain child of Haverford physics' professor Bill Davidon, whose daughter is a member of San Francisco Friends Meeting, and with whom I saw this interesting film not too long ago).
After being a student for a year there, I stayed at Pendle Hill for about another 3 years, before heading to the SF Bay Area to study Yoga (doing a 2 year Iyengar Yoga certificate course in a year, but very much appreciating Angela and Victor's yoga throughout this process). Upon returning to the Bay Area, Reed friends were still living in communal houses (kinds of Berkeley hippie communes in a way, but without many Quakers in them, that I'm aware of), which I stayed in.
I think folk song and music themselves can inspire the vision of communitas, community and communal living, and even generate kinds of communality or communal living in the moment. Perhaps the Quaker lyrics' book "Rise Up Singing" (with its new companion volume) with its many protest songs came out of such a vision of a kind of communal living.
When World University's NonTheist Friends' School / Subject wiki (for open teaching and learning) page - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Nontheist_Friends_(atheist_Quakers%3F) - is a little farther along, and beyond its current clunky Wikia wiki phase, I'll/we can create a wiki-section for "Where to post Quaker history question about communal living."
Wallace, are you living in Friendly-informed communal living circumstances now in Ithaca, New York?
Thanks, Tim - will you be at the Friends Association for Higher Education (FAHE) at Woodbrooke Quaker Centre in June 2016? Does Woodbrooke, like Pendle Hill's communal living (as well as all the Friendly-Informed Kendall Corporation's continuing care centers on the east coast of the US) have any "communal living" roots? Are there examples of communal living from the British Isles that you would point too (beyond perhaps Old Jordans west of London, which I've heard has the highest concentration of Quakers in the UK, or possibly still in NW England)? Or in Seattle where you were based for some while working for Microsoft? (Nice to have met you in person at Meeting in SF a few years ago:)
Thank you.
Friendly regards,
Scott
*
_(3).jpg)
...