The Idea of a Village is a conference held in the vicinity of Clear Creek Abbey.
More than twenty-five years ago, Benedictine monks came to northeast Oklahoma to establish a Catholic Abbey in the Diocese of Tulsa.
Soon after, families began moving nearby, seeking to order their lives around the prayer and witness of the monks. As friendships deepened and lives became increasingly intertwined, a village began to emerge, fostered by Divine Providence.
After a several-year hiatus, The Idea of a Village returns as a forum for villagers and guests to gather and discuss the foundations of Catholic community, participate in hands-on breakout sessions, and enjoy feasting and conversation.
We hope you'll join us.
Speakers 2026
Abbot Philip Anderson is the founding abbot of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma, a beacon of traditional Benedictine life in the United States. A convert from Protestantism, he has guided the abbey since its establishment in 1999, overseeing its growth into a flourishing community dedicated to the Rule of St Benedict and the solemn celebration of the traditional Latin liturgy.
Andrew Pudewa is the founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing. Presenting around the world, he addresses issues relating to teaching, writing, thinking, and spelling with clarity, insight, practical experience, and humor. His seminars for parents, students, and teachers have helped transform many a reluctant writer and have equipped educators with powerful tools to dramatically improve students’ skills. He and his beautiful, heroic wife, Robin, homeschooled their seven children and are now proud grandparents of nineteen, making their home in Clear Creek.
Robert Keim earned a PhD in Renaissance poetry and drama after undergraduate and graduate study in literature, linguistics, mathematics, physics, Spanish, history, and pedagogy. He has practiced small-scale agriculture and researched traditional lifestyles in four states and one foreign country, and now he's a teacher, a poet, a ballet dancer, an author of books and numerous essays, and a secular brother of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in London.
Michael Guidice lives with his wife and 6 children in Sharon Springs NY where they have a small apple orchard and sheep flock. They have been homesteading for over a decade. Michael is the executive Director of the contemporary "Catholic Land Movement" which helps facilitate the rural resettlement of Catholics onto productive property they own. He is passionate about creating practical action motivated by the Social teachings given to us from the Church.
Mitchell Blackburn received both his Bachelor's in English in 2016 and his Master's in Politics in 2024 from the University of Dallas. He has taught English, Literature, Sacred Scripture, and History at Catholic Schools over the past decade and currently runs a woodworking and Log Cabin building company in Muskogee, OK with his three brothers. His book on Fr. Heinrich Pesch and Catholic Social teaching focuses on the importance of families for the national economy.
“The restoration of reason presupposes the restoration of love, and we can only love what we know because we have first touched, tasted, smelled, heard and seen. From that encounter with exterior reality, interior responses naturally arise, movements motivating, urging, releasing energies, infinitely greater than atoms, of intelligence and will. Without these motives, thought and action are aimless, sometimes random, more frequently mechanical, having an order but a tyrannical order, that is, an order imposed from without.”
— John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture
