The new monasticism is a name for something that does not quite have a name yet: the deliberate construction of intentional community, in urban or semi-urban settings, by people who draw on monastic practice and philosophy but are not bound by religious vows, not separated from the wider world by cloister walls, and not organized primarily around theological commitment. The term was coined — or at least popularized — in the American Christian context, by figures like Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, who articulated twelve marks of new monastic community in the early 2000s. But the phenomenon extends well beyond that Christian framing. The same structural impulse — the deliberate construction of shared life organized around something more than convenience — appears in secular intentional communities, in cooperative living experiments, in co-housing developments, in urban communal houses organized around shared values, and in what some sociologists have called "intentional secular living."
The common structure across these forms is simple to describe and extremely difficult to sustain: people choose to live in proximity, to share some portion of their resources and time, to hold each other accountable to shared values, and to be genuinely present to each other's lives in ways that ordinary suburban or apartment living does not require. The friendship produced in these contexts is, by the accounts of participants and researchers who have studied them, qualitatively different from friendship formed in less structured social environments. It is more demanding, more honest, more tested, and — when it survives the testing — more resilient.
The monastic influence is specific. From the Benedictine tradition, new monastic communities tend to draw the concept of a common rule — a shared agreement about how communal life will be organized, what commitments members will uphold, what practices will be held in common. The rule is not a legal contract; it is a covenant, a relational commitment that frames the life of the community and gives its members a shared language for holding each other accountable. The rule transforms what might otherwise be merely a shared address into a shared project, and the shared project is what gives friendship in these communities its particular texture: people are not just living together but working together on something they have agreed matters.
The friendship dynamics of new monastic communities have been documented in enough community memoirs, sociological studies, and theological reflections to reveal a consistent pattern. The first phase, almost universally, is idealization: the community is understood as a space of genuine love and mutual recognition, and this idealization drives the energy of formation. The second phase is disillusionment: the specific people in the community turn out to be specific, not ideal, and the daily friction of shared life — whose turn it is to clean, how decisions are made, what to do when someone's behavior contradicts the shared rule — exposes the limits of idealization. The communities that survive this phase do so by discovering that the disillusionment is not a failure of the communal project but its substance: that genuine community is built not in the idealization phase but in the decisions made during disillusionment about whether to stay, repair, and go deeper.
This pattern is, at its core, a dignity pattern. The Law 5 reading of intentional community is about what it means to actually recognize another person in the fullness of their specific existence — not as a community member in the abstract, but as this person, with these habits, these fears, these particular ways of being difficult, and this irreplaceable quality of presence. The idealization phase is a dignity failure: it replaces actual persons with the idea of community. The disillusionment phase forces the upgrade: the actual recognition of actual people, which is what community, and friendship, actually consist of.
The secular versions of new monastic community — the ones not organized around explicit religious commitment — face a specific challenge that the religious versions partially escape. Without a shared theological framework, the shared values that organize the community must be negotiated explicitly and held without the authority that religious tradition provides. This makes secular intentional community both more democratic and more fragile: more democratic because it cannot appeal to inherited authority, more fragile because explicit negotiation about values is exhausting and contentious and tends to dissolve in the face of the simpler alternative of living separately and ignoring the friction.
What the new monastic movement has produced, imperfectly and with many failures, is a set of practices for building friendship-dense community in conditions that do not naturally produce it: practices of shared accountability, structured conflict resolution, regular communal discernment, and the maintenance of a shared story that gives members a sense of belonging to something larger than any individual friendship. These practices are not magic. They require sustained commitment and willingness to be inconvenienced by community. But they are, among the available responses to the friendship deficits of modern life, among the most structurally serious.