www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Parish Life & Evangelization Building a Byzantine Catholic Village

Gordo,

Sounds like a wonderful idea for EVERY parish.

Joe

Joe,

Great idea! Something to perhaps consider...

Here are some interesting websites on "AVe Maria" Town in Florida. THe town, as some of you may know, if built around an oratory and a univeristy.

Of course, this is an extremely high ticket venture. (I don't think I would be too far off in assuming this thing costs more to build than the 5 year budget of the Metropolia!) But it is an interesting idea.

http://www.naples.avemaria.edu/Media/

I like Diak's suggestion - let it grow slowly and organically - like the vegetables.

:-) Gordo

PS; It would be interesting to see if Transfiguration College would ever be interested long term in building a Byzantine Catholic community around it. I know, I know. That's alot of Pizzas. But it's just a thought...

By the way, the projected Church central to the Ave Maria University has been scaled down to 1/3 of the original design by the principal owner/developer to save on the corresponding costs and earmarked them for other university facilities and improvements (from US$100 million for the Church alone down to US$24 million).

Mr. Monaghan does have a keen sense of how many Domino's Pizza it takes to make up the difference of US$76 million.

Good decision!

http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=58949

Last I heard Transfiguration College was planning to set up shop in downtown Aurora. A suburb of Chicago is the wrong place for this sort of thing, land's far too expensive for our kind of homeschooling, homesteading, partially subsistence farming sort of life. One aspect of all of this is not to be downtown, or have to go downtown on a regular basis.

I prefer something more in line with the Charlier brothers, Henri Fabre, as well as Benedictine, Russian and Greek rural schools around monasteries.

I'm with you there, Diak. I think an urban setting is prone to far more distraction than to reflection, which cultivates a more authentic experience of a classical education.

As Ephrem the Syrian points out, is not creation God's first revelation? Why not establish a school that seeks to ground its students in the realism of the Great Books tradition do so surrounded by creation, rather than the "synthetic" or "fabricated" environments of city living which exist precisely to create distance with the created world?

And while your at it, build a Byzantine village that integrates faith, learning and manual work with the realities of family and community life?

If I had 1/4 or 1/8 or 1/16 of what Tom's spending on that chapel, Oi! what a place that would be!

Gordo

Absolutely, Gordo. The students have to see and experience the beauty and mystery of the created cosmos, look at it around them, to bring all together what they are reading. They need to be surrounded by God's created cosmos, not the structures and works of modern man.

Frost can't be fully appreciated without taking walks at those seasonal times he so well describes in his poems. Ephraim the Syrian's Hymns on Paradise can't really be appreciated in its fullness without that natural manifestation of God's goodness in the cosmos around you.

When you plant something, nurture it and see it come to fruition, when you pull out a baby lamb at 3 in the morning and see what life is in its most essential forms, then you have something real which brings the absolutely needed tangible part of education so oft forgotten today. And with a farm, the gymnastic element, also so sorely needed, falls right into place on a regular, daily basis.

You can talk about it all you want to while the cars whizz by outside, honks and sirens punctuating the lecture. It ain't the same, not even close.

It would seem that we are not alone in our dream. This dream is bigger than just ours.

http://www.christianexodus.org/

I know, I know. It is a little different but the idea is fascinating.

Dan L

Wow!

Um...I wasn't planning to secede from the union, though! (Being a "uniate" after all! j/k, of course!)

Here are a couple of places that strike me as ogod models to consider. One of these I have actually visited. It was marvellous!

http://www.paceminterris.org

http://www.cohousing.net/resources/whatis.html

http://www.cd.gov.ab.ca/enjoying_al...age_village/education_programs/index.asp

There are a few others I will post later, but I am having computer problems...

Gordo

Here are a few other examples, with ideas that may be interesting...

http://www.littleportion.org/Tour/tour.html

http://www.madonnahouse.org/programs/cana.html

http://www.madonnahouse.org/tour/tour01.html

Gordo

Well, I thought I'd bring back this topic because the idea of moving to a farm in general has been on my mind the past month. My grandpa has a family farm of over 100 acres that is being rented out (farm land to farmers, house to one of my grandpa's employees), and if I could swing it with my work and wife(she'd be the tougher of the two) I'd love to move there and have my grandpa and father teach me how to do some good old farming!

ANYWAYS, I propose that our village specialize in rare breeds of livestock (obviously natural/organic). We could then sell our high quality rare beef that we didn't consume to gourmet markets and high end restaurants.

The following article got my mouth watering!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5963343

Anyways, just keeping the dream alive!

This is so awesome! I don't have any farming experience whatsoever, but I love outside work, and this would be absolutely ideal for me. I don't know about my fiance. But I would love to raise my future kids (God willing) in a place like this.

Here is an article that I think people in this thread would find interesting. It is about a new Catholic college in Wyoming, a 4 year Great Books curriculum that will also have an emphasis on nature, etc.

http://www.unavoce.org/news/2004/wyoming_college.html

One doesn't necessarily need a great deal of land to embrace an agrarian-style of life. A few chickens, one hog fed with scraps, etc. can always be done on a smaller scale.

Sometimes breeds are "rare" for various reasons, and not always artifical. Sometimes they simply do not adapt to the climate, precipitation, certain ambient parasites, etc. of a different area.

Sometimes it is artificial, in that they simply because they don't put on the growth that the "commercial breeds" do, which for a smaller-scale subsistence homesteader is not a consideration, really. I have several breeds of sheep and goats, some common, and some not.

Often the cross-breeds do the best, and on a small scale you want the healthiest and least labor-intensive animals you can get. Right now I have a cross of Rambouillet, Montadale, and Border Leicester sheep that are doing very well. But definitely something either organic or at least anti-biotic free is the way to go.

MFC, look for great things from the Wyoming college. Bob Carlson, who is the prime mover, was a student and later student teacher of the same GB program I attended a few years back at the University of Kansas.
DRLB

CIX!

Just a thought - I'm not entirely sure that an urban setting is unconducive to a Classical education.

After all, historically, the great centres of Classical scholarship, civilisation and culture have all been the major cities of the Classical world. I'm thinking of Athens, Alexandria and Antioch to begin with, but then later Rome, Contantinople, Paris join the group, and those three cities were the mega-cities of the Medi�val world, as urbane as one couldd get.

The Studite house in Constantinople is perhaps a good example of monastic life in the midddle of a city.

My two denarii...

Edward

Ed, certainly those are valid points. One only has to look to Socrates and his Athenian locales for the dialogues.

It can work, but in antiquity one could dwell in the city and have a sense of the gymnastic (walking, small gardens, etc.). In the post-modern, Gameboy era that doesn't necessarily hold anymore.

An agrarian setting with a farm gives the opportunity for experiencing certain tangible realities not possible with other urban settings, as well as an overall greater chance for regular opportunities to integrate the gymnastic into the overall education.
DRLB