OSHER 522 - Building the City of God

Nineteenth century American communitarian societies focused on communal property but were also marked by common core spiritual values, from Alcott's Transcendentalist experience, Fruitlands, to John Humphrey Noyce's Oneida Community, which was established to usher in Jesus's millennial reign. Similarly, early LDS "United Orders" aspired to help build the kingdom of God on Earth. The United Order at Orderville was the most successful of these, lasting from 1874 to 1885. This 90-minute session will briefly place the LDS experience within a larger context, before exploring what made the Orderville United Order so successful, how it operated, and how it came to its end. The group will then consider what might be drawn from these earlier experiences in a world fractured by political and secular acrimony.