The Oneida Experiment: What We Have Discovered About Not-So-Free Love
by Frederica Mathewes-Green
From the November 2002 issue of Touchstone Magazine.
Excerpt:
In the middle of the room there was a woodburning stove. The small iron door
was open on this chilly day, and the red flames could be seen leaping within
as if in time to music. For there was music, too, a marching song, and the little
girls who circled the stove marched around it in time. The girls were not happy.
Each girl was holding in her arms her favorite doll. These were pretty dolls
with painted faces, who usually wore fancy clothes reflecting current fashion.
But today the clothes had been left in a pile, and the wax figurines were exposed,
hard and bare. One by one, each girl marched up to the open door of the stove.
One by one, each girl threw her doll into the “angry-looking flames.”
The phrase is that of Harriet Worden, a woman who participated in the sacrifice
that day and recalled the painful event long after. It was 1851, in the utopian
community of Oneida, in upstate New York. What was being burned up that day
was an unseemly trait that their teachers had observed developing in the little
girls of the commune. The dolls had become too important to the children; these
were frivolous toys, indicating an affection for worldly finery and vain display.
Women of Oneida were expected to bob their hair rather than fuss it to flattering
styles, and to wear efficient clothing rather than long, sweeping gowns. They
were to work in the factories alongside the men, while men took their equal
share of labor in the kitchen. Pretty dolls were a tantalizing, subversive distraction.
Augustine the Bishop in the Light of New Documents
By Peter Brown
For the Center of Theological Inquiry
Excerpt:
Yet, despite Possidius’ efforts, not all of Augustine’s “living
voice” would be heard, by all persons all the time, in subsequent centuries.
Augustine’s formal works had been carefully placed in order by Augustine
himself, in his Retractationes, and by Possidius, in the Indiculum
attached to the Life of Augustine. These formal, theological works were
regularly copied throughout the Middle Ages and were published, in their entirety,
in the great printed editions of early modern times. Our knowledge of Augustine
the theologian comes from them. But at the time, in his own lifetime, the letters
and sermons of Augustine were just as important for his activity as a Catholic
bishop. To be a preacher, a seminator verbi, a “sower of the Word
of God” to his congregation, and not to be a theologian, was the job description
of any late Roman bishop. Augustine was no exception. It is his letters and
sermons that take us to the heart of his life as a Christian leader in North
Africa. These letters and sermons were also listed in Possidius’ Indiculum.
But they were not copied as systematically or as regularly in later centuries.
The collection of letters and sermons that appeared in the printed editions
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represent only a proportion of those
which Augustine had originally written and preached. Although modern scholars
have used these, as the basis of their study of Augustine as a bishop, they
have always known this fact. They had before them all the formal works
of Augustine; but not all the letters and sermons. Many other sermons and letters
had appeared in the original list given in Possidius’ Indiculum.
Some of these were known through references, even through extracts, in medieval
works. But they had not been included in the printed editions. They still awaited
discovery.
