Seeds of the Kingdom : Utopian Communities in the Americas

In these skeptical and disillusioned times, there are nevertheless still groups of people scattered throughout the world who are trying to live out utopian dreams. In this book, Anna Peterson reflects on the experiences of two very different communities, one inhabited by impoverished former refugees in the mountains of El Salvador and the other by Amish farmers in the Midwestern U.S. What makes these communities stand out among advocates of environmental protection, political justice, and sustainable development is their Roman Catholic social thought, whike the Amish adhere to Anabaptist tradition. Peterson examines their community organization, religious life, environmental values, and agricultural practices, and discovers both practical and ideological commonalities in these two comparatively successful and sustainable communities. In the process she sheds light on the process by which people struggle to live according to a transcendent value system, and hence on the actual and potential place of religion in public life. She argues that these rural places, geographically and culturally distant from the lives of most people in the industrialized West, are relevant to urgent political and environmental problems facing the developed world.