In 1824, Owen’s arrival in New York was met with fanfare by many members of elite and artistic societies. “Here was a village ready built, a territory capable of supporting tens of thousands in a country where the expression of thought was free, and where the people were unsophisticated.” “The offer tempted my father,” wrote Owen’s son in a collection of essays written by Robert Owen on behalf of The Atlantic Monthly magazine in the mid-1800s. The Harmony Society, a communitarian religious group who owned a large settlement in Indiana, wanted to sell all of its lands (including 3,000 cultivated acres), businesses, homes, and manufacturing sites. Then, in 1824, news arrived from the United States. His ideas for a utopian society soon lost support in Britain, and Owen longed for a place to live out his communitarian experiment. Bakken of the Indiana Magazine of History. “Owen wanted to see communities built around cooperation, human betterment, a lack of the competition, greed, and other evils that he saw infecting the character of so many children and adults,” according to a historical account by author Dawn E. Robert Owen’s views of a new society, which he published in a series of essays, were predicated on his concern about the character development of an individual. The sense of New Harmony’s place was conceived in Scotland by Robert Owen, an industrialist, who had made a name for himself as a social reformer in the early 1800s. If sense of place is a sixth sense – an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together, as writer and historian Rebecca Solnit tells us – then New Harmony and the Roofless Church are intertwined with a sense of unity and egalitarian belonging. Library of Congress What was the New Harmony community? True to his egalitarian principles, Owen insisted that the Smithsonian take as its mission the increase of knowledge and its popular dissemination. In 1842, Owen was elected to Congress, where one of his most important acts was introducing the bill that established the Smithsonian Institution. The sculpture assures us that no one suffers alone, even as we bear our individual crosses. The image of the Holy Father appears large behind the crucified Christ as the He supports the arms of the Son. It is an interpretation of a 15 th century wood carving in the National Museum of Kraków. The Ewa Żygulska sculpture calls on visitors to honor the invincible spirit of the Polish people who suffered under Nazi occupation. The two other pieces reside at the Roman Catholic Church of d’Assy, Haute Savoire, France and the Ecumenical Abbey of Iona, Scotland. This piece is one of three original casts of the sculpture by Jewish artist Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973). Located under the cedar-shingled dome, the centerpiece of the church, rests a bronze sculpture representing the Holy Spirit (dove) descending upon a divine feminine form who opens to give birth. Johnson and his benefactor, the late Jane Blaffer Owen, envisioned a church where the only roof large enough to encompass a world of worshipers was the sky! A modernist masterpiece designed by renowned architect Philip Johnson in New Harmony, Indiana, the Roofless Church encompasses an outdoor garden plaza the size of a city block.
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