Kate Macdonald alerts us to a beautifully illustrated article from The Guardian about the Bruderhof, who celebrate their centenary this year. Two books are promised soon.

Kate writes:

I’m interested because Edward, a (late) weighty Friend I knew in Brussels always spoke of the Mennonites and the Bruderhof as his ideals for pacifist patterns and examples. If you look past the conservative dressing and the sex segregation, they seem successful, healthy, productive and living a fairly distributed life. I have a beady eye for the visual signals of religion-sponsored oppression that we see in images of sects that make women wear headscarves and long skirts, and the Bruderhof seem less extreme than many others. The fact that their youth can study science in mixed groups, and that men take a share in early years childcare, as the images suggest, seems like a healthy society.

A baby show in Danthonia, Australia. Photographer Danny Burrows spent two years documenting the Anabaptist pacifist Christian Bruderhof.

The full article is here. The Bruderhof plan in Sept 2020 to launch a book Another Life Is Possible to celebrate their centenary. With a foreword by Rowan Williams it will describe community life via testimonials from communities around the world. It will be followed in 2021 by a photographic book.