Tag Archives: cultural factors

Loving and Living on the Margins

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“We’re a non-violent Catholic lay community, but we try to get it right,” says Brayton Shanley, hands on his hips in the front yard of Agape. “There are a lot of folks out there who don’t do it right. We always say, ‘you gotta do it right’.” 

The most striking thing about Brayton is his deep commitment to the ideals of his faith, especially when living intentionally on, as he calls it, “ the margins”.

Brayton and Suzanne Shanley are the cofounders of the Agape Community, outside of Hardwick, Massachusetts. Agape is a lay community—meaning religious but not part of the church. Pronounced ‘ah-gah-pay’, the name is a Greek term which in Christian theology means unconditional love, specifically spiritual love that expands to all people. It was this name, and the fact that Agape has been around for so long, that drew me to their community in the first place.

Photo from the Agape Website

For many who have been hurt by the Church through oppression or rejection on the basis of gender, race, or sexual orientation, many images of organized religion create a hostile environment. Much of the work that Agape does is to counter that legacy of harm, to “do it right” and live in line with Jesus’s teachings of non-violence and activism.

I have always been interested in intentional communities, places where people try to live everyday life both together and in line with their values. Many intentional communities were founded in the late 1960s and 1970s, as part of the Back to the Land Movement, and while a few remain active, the vast majority have dissolved. 

Agape remains. And the main question on my mind as I took the three hour journey there was: why?

Agape was founded in 1987, but Suzanne and Brayton – the founders and my hosts – began their work in the mid-1970s, drawing on their Catholic and Quaker faith traditions. Inspired by the work of Milwaukee Fourteen, a group of Catholic priests who protested the VietNam war and Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, also nonviolent Catholic activists, they organized for disarmament and non-violence throughout the 1970s-90s. 

When I arrived in the early evening, there were several cars in the steep driveway that leads to Agape. Next to the late fall garden, still volunteering some late rainbow chard and a truly astonishing amount of parsley, two houses stand, woodsmoke drifting up from their chimneys. Above the doorway of the main house was a rainbow flag that read: “Peace”. It felt like home. 

I stood in the yard for a bit, taking in the surroundings. Small placards beneath most trees offered dedications to lost loved ones, calls for peace, prayers for healing. A keffiyeh, a scarf symbolizing solidarity with Palestine, winding between pumpkins on the porch. A St. Francis statue sat next to the door, a small bird perched on his shoulder. Every corner revealed symbols of the deep calling for peace and non-violence that are the founding light of Agape. 

Photo taken at Agape

As I walked up to the main building, and ventured a timid knock, a shout from behind me brought my attention to an older man with a shock white hair, half jogging towards me, with a cordless phone in his hand. “We’ll be right with ya’! Glad you could make it.” He gave me a hug and then hustled back into the house behind him. This was my first introduction to Brayton Shanley. 

After a tour of St. Brigid House, where Brayton and Suzanne live, we went into the main house for dinner. Symbols of faith decorated every surface, from the mantle above the fireplace, to the door which leads to a small one-room chapel, complete with a beautiful stained glass window mounted above a natural driftwood cross. 

I offered to help with dinner, feeling sheepish about their open hospitality that asked nothing of me, while offering so much. Instead, Suzanne simply offered a hug in greeting, and shepherrded me down to their office to chat. Here, too, were countless photographs of Swamis and Catholic priests, clippings of newspapers, portraits of leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Suzanne sat me down with a plate of chips and homemade salsa verde, and said, “So what would you like to know?” 

I asked her to tell me about Agape. And with a twinkle in her eye, she began with its founding in the 1980s and their fight against nuclear arms, and then moved on to talk about their push against the death penalty in the U.S. and towards interfaith peace in the Middle East. The stories Suzanne told affirmed that what Brayton had said outside was true: these were people who were walking the walk, ‘the real deal’, you might say. 

Agape’s ministry extended to death row, where Suzanne and Brayton developed a long-term relationship with Billy Neal Moore, a formerly incarcerated man who would become the first confessed murderer to receive a full commutation of a death sentence as a result of the Shanelys’ support. In fact, as I was sitting in an Uber on my way to Agape, Billy and Suzanne were in their kitchen, on the phone with Moore, sharing the most recent events and struggles in their lives. 

Agape prioritizes non-violence in all things, in community, in activism, in speech, in food and lifestyle. Any conflicts within the group were addressed by sitting down and trying to find common ground. Even though it can be difficult, sometimes, to avoid harm, it is time for community members to part ways, Suzanne said. 

The Agape houses are built and heated with wood harvested from the property around it. All of the logging is done with conscious choice and respect to the natural world. Before dinner, Brayton’s tour took me through the design of the St. Brigid House, with its straw bale construction and solar panels. Agape has been vegetarian for years, but recently, went vegan to further reduce harm to the environment and animals. 

At Agape, alcohol is not allowed and intimate sexual relationships are discouraged on the premises, even for guests. Despite all of these restrictions and the challenges of experimental living, people love to experience Agape: Some come for a weekend. Others stay for years. As Brayton says, “it’s a calling…it’s not easy, but it’s a calling.” 

I have looked at dozens of intentional communities, many of which were also founded in the 1970s and 1980s but have since dissolved. Interns and volunteers help keep Agape afloat, along with long term support from a network of religious and secular partners, but it did lead me to wonder how Suzanne and Brayton cope with the transience, the flow of people, interns, workers, friends, in and out of their community. 

Unbeknownst to me, Agape was facing that exact question, as she and Brayton enter their 80s. “People come and they stay and they get nurtured and so welled up with the beauty of intentional community …and they don’t land,” she said, with a sigh. Despite a lively community and hundreds, if not thousands, of supporters, Suzanne and Brayton are the only original two that remain full-time residents. 

Eventually, Brayton came down and interrupted my conversation with Suzanne. It was time for dinner. Around the table and over some of the best vegan food I have had in years, Sister Judy from Ipswich and Dixon, who had prepared the lovely meal for us. I had been there for all of an hour or so, and yet I sat around their table, chatting and laughing with them. We talked about the struggles of raising children in intentional communities and about the related phenomenon that Suzanne describes as “launch, but not land” that characterizes so much communal living. 

The idea of a “calling” kept coming up throughout the night, as we gradually moved from discussions of meaning and compassion, religious and otherwise, to the more concrete, as I asked about how Agape handles healthcare, conflict resolution meetings and all the other nuts and bolts of communal living. The calling required to live this kind of life—a life dedicated to love, peace, and deep, deep non-violence—isn’t one that can be brought down by loss or insecurity, especially at points of transition.

I had come to Agape, curious about how they had managed to have the longevity that they have had over the years, and was almost disheartened to see how small the actual residential community is. Children raised and moved out, interns gone for the season, the Agape I visited was one of deep love, support, compassion and very few people.

As the night went along, I started to question the assumptions I had coming to Agape. As Brayton and Suzanne retired to bed, and I lay in one of the cold upper rooms, warm under a quilt blanket, I realized that the sorrow and fear of loss, the idea of a failed community, just because of the number of lasting residents, was of my own creation. Things don’t have to be permanent to be valuable. They don’t have to be unchanging to be impactful. Agape is living proof.

Everyday Utopia: Putting Modern Utopian Movements into Historical Context

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Kristen Ghodsee is no stranger to communism— or at least, “closet communism.” That is what her family called it when her and her daughter, conveniently the same size,  began sharing their clothing freely during the Covid 19 pandemic. 

In her book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Ghodsee leads with the impact  Covid had on her family life in order to then unpack how political and economic upheaval can drive people to seek alternative experimental lives—or, in other words, to seek utopia. 

Ghodsee’s so-called “closet communism” reflects the fundamental point of Everyday Utopia: we engage in the kind of open sharing that is demonized as “communism”—only that it is limited to the context of our own homes. 

A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Ghodsee  has written several books on the topic of communism and socialism. In Everyday Utopia she takes a step back, surveying  the multitude of experimental living that has existed for millennia. 

Everyday Utopia starts with the feminist, intellectual community of Kroton, founded by Pythagoras (better  known for his works on triangles) around 500 BCE and concludes with the modern cohousing and family expansionist movements of the 2020s, covering the wide range of concerns that have faced experimental living communities.

 Experimental living is by nature, experimental, and as such range far and wide in their ideologies. Ghodsee makes the argument that early monasteries, both Christian and Buddhist, served as models for the experimental living communities that followed. Some, like Charles Fourier’s combination factory and housing units in France in the late 1700s, supported an integrated form of communal living to maximize productivity. Others, like the 19th century Oneida Community in Upstate New York, were organized around radical or ‘heretical’ religious beliefs, such as non-hierarchical worship or women’s equality.

As a feminist scholar, Ghodsee uniquely incorporates the role that women have played in these movements, both as intellectual drivers of experimental living, and also as beneficiaries of models of labor, child rearing and domestic life that characterize many experimental living initiatives. This sets her approach apart from earlier studies.  Around the world, women have been and still are expected to do the unpaid labor of cooking, cleaning, child rearing, and providing emotional support. Given this, experimental living often aims to make these shared tasks, giving  freedom to women who want to spend their time elsewhere. 

The concrete examples Ghodsee uses to expand readers’ imagination suggest how we might change our own lives, either radically or hesitantly, into our own utopias of experimental living. As she writes, “change is always fueled by the perseverance of those who believe that we can do better.”

Ghodsee skillfully unpacks even the most radical ideas for structuring interpersonal relationships. For instance, the polyamorous, so-called ‘complex marriages’ of the Oneida perfectionist religious community, where social reproductive roles were shared by all adults, are still considered radical almost two centuries later. In giving attention to these alternative relationships, she challenges the reader to question the societal ideals of monogamy and the nuclear family. 

Still, Everyday Utopia shies away from some of the downsides of utopias and the failures of those who strive to create them. And when experimental living goes wrong, it causes real harm. For example, the antisemitism that Charles  Fourier propagated in his communal living spaces furthered an already deeply antisemitic streak in 18th century French society, which would resurface in the late 1800s with the Dreyfus affair. Other communities that have engaged in polygamy often have issues with sex-based violence and can intensify patriarchal control, as some sects of Mormonism. The isolation of many intentional communities also makes it difficult for vulnerable people to get help and support if leaders abuse their power.

Even as it acknowledges the downside, Everyday Utopia is asking the question “can’t we do this better?”, in search of what everyone is seeking: the good life.  Maybe someday, we’ll find it. It won’t be easy, but as Ghodsee reminds us: “hope is a muscle we must use”.

Degrowth: End of Society or Vision of the Future?

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Image Source: Kamiel Choi

Degrowth is a bit of a buzzword these days. Some of the press is bad, like the WIRED article titled “Why Degrowth Is the Worst Idea on the Planet.” Some of the press is good. Bestselling books like Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel make that case. And like all hot button ideas these days, degrowth is fervently debated on X.

What is degrowth?

Degrowth, in the most limited sense, questions economic ‘growth’—an ever-expanding GDP, for example—as the goal of economic policy. In modern day politics, economic growth is considered not only to be a net good, but a hallmark of a healthy society. In fact, this is one of the few issues both presidential candidates Harris and Trump can agree on. Trump said this explicitly in the 2024 debate, promising a “bigger, better and stronger” and Harris got more specific with her highlight on growing the “clean energy economy”. In a political climate so polarized, “growth is good” is something most everyone seems to agree on. 

The idea of degrowth has been around since the 1970s, when French economist André Gorz coined the term while studying economic policy specifically—but until now, it hasn’t gained much traction in a culture that leads with ‘growth is good’. With existential climate apocalypse looming, so too are questions about the status quo.

Public vs personal approaches

As concern about climate change comes more into the mainstream, people trying to live with less impact on the environment often adopt terms like “degrowth” from academia to describe lifestyle choices that they are promoting. Zero-waste, slow living, communes, intentional communities, anti-consumerism, right-to-repair, ‘live local, think global’ and de-influencing are all social and personal approaches to the degrowth movement, focusing primarily on individual choices that shift families and communities away from relying on a system of infinite economic growth to a low consumption model of living. While most have good intentions, they can seem a little out of touch. Think vegan food influencers and TikToks telling you to get rid of your washing machine. 

The other camp is far closer to Gorz’s original technical usage of the term: the public policy of degrowth. Proponents of this interpretation push for economic and social policies for degrowth, such as moving away from GDP as an indicator of prosperity, and redirecting efforts from sustainable development in the global North to sustainable degrowth, such as prioritizing winterization of existing structures over building new LEED-certified buildings.

In contrast to their vegan, anti-consumer counterparts, policy degrowth advocates usually focus on national and international investment and subsidies systems over individual consumer choice. Some like Jason Hickel do advocate for a complete overhaul of the global economy, but most take a more moderate approach, asking that governments stop using a booming economy as an indicator of wellbeing and instead focus on human needs.

Why are people so mad? 

The majority of the people who take to the Internet to complain about degrowth are responding to political degrowth supporters, but are spreading their message using the imagery of personal degrowth advocates. In a society where growth is not only good, but essential for survival, any push back against that is experienced as threatening. For many contemporary economists, who have dedicated their studies and often their careers to the advancement of growth, degrowth is a dangerous movement that threatens to crash the economy and spread some quasi-Marxist, socialist, global new world order where no one is allowed to eat meat or own a car. 

Pragmatic environmentalists also oppose degrowth because, however valuable it might be, they see the total overhaul of the economy as dead-in-the-water in the current political landscape. Instead, they argue that harnessing the power of economic growth and incentives—such as design competitions or cheap solar panel production—will save the planet from all its climate change woes.

Feminist opposition to degrowth is lesser known but also important.  The current ‘washing machine debates’ give a snapshot of how conversations about individual degrowth are shaped by personal privilege. The washing machine transformed the lives of women starting in the 1950s. They along with other time-saving appliances allowed women to work outside the home, while still fulfilling traditional roles as wife and mother. There is an implicit belief underlying critiques of personal degrowth that only those who have forgotten the struggles of past generations would choose to give up these technologies that shape the world today.

A similar debate concerns how people with disabilities who rely on systems for medicine and adaptive technology would cope without these. The vast system of international shipping that fuels the global economy also delivers ingredients for the manufacture of life-saving medication, like insulin. Aspects of consumption like plastic straws and disposable paper towels are a convenience product many enjoy, but can play a huge role in a disabled person’s day to day life. Unequivocally, the type of personal degrowth choices that are promoted are at odds with technologies that empower disabled people to have agency in their own lives. 

These two critiques of degrowth get tangled in the current debates, clouding both the meaning of degrowth as a term, and sending these two different communities sailing past each other, fighting a strawman army of their own making. 

Why should people care?

While people on the internet have a lot of thoughts about degrowth, the theory may seem out of touch with the current struggles and needs of people on the ground. Political degrowth is an abstract idea being debated in even more abstract terms, where thinkers throw around acronyms like GDP and ILO. Even the personal degrowth of pristine, zero-waste households plastered over the internet that are used to sell metal straws and reusable coffee cups seem out of touch for most middle class consumers.  Why should anyone with a job, bills, family to worry about, care about degrowth?

One reason is that, for better and for worse, economic policy shapes the lives of everyone. Conversations around tax rates, development, sustainable or otherwise, inflation reduction, and budgeting all start with an implicit assumption that growth is good; growth will bring more people health, wealth and happiness. 

How do we go forward?

Popular eco-friendly ideas like sustainable development, buy-less, and the Green New Deal are often seen as a panacea to the problem of climate change. This thinking is understandable. Human suffering, particularly at the hands of the natural world, is scary. An uncertain future is scary. And people respond with the hope that if we just find the right solution, the silver bullet, weed out the bad apples, and then we will be okay. 

In focusing on washing machines and other conveniences, we fight amongst ourselves, stuck in a cycle of judging, justifying and defending. The degrowth debates, in their chaos, remind us that it is easy to talk about big ideas on the Internet, it is easy to make sweeping generalizations about how people should live, and it is easy to be distracted by tech bros on X. What it is hard to do is think critically, imagine a better world and fight to create it, present with the now.

As Andre Gorz reminds us, “theory always runs the risk of blinding us to the shifting complexities of the real world. [Instead, we should] live completely at one with the present, mindful above all of the wealth of our shared life”.

Can Megacities Be Sustainable?

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Skyline of Tokyo during the night

Picture taken by toykoform (flickr.com)

9/15/2015 by Alisha Pegan

As the plane descends for landing, what is your first thought when you peek out the airplane window and take in the countless lights, cars, and buildings living below?

A common reaction is “WOW. There are so, so many!”. Yes, so many things and people buzzing about and taking up resources, water, energy, human capital. So, what feeds it all? Where does the supply begin and where does it end? And in the perspective of sustainability: is there a way to make it full circle? Is there and could there be a self-sustaining megacity?

This question is a global concern. The WorldBank statistics indicate that currently 54% of the global population lives in urban areas and by 2030 it will increase 66%. As urban density increases, county and city governments are investigating and applying strategies to manage the people, as well as their short and long term needs, while providing a high quality of life. Navigating the intercept of quality of life and sustainability on a city-wide level can provide systematic solutions, such as livability, green infrastructure, and resilience. Various megacities will serve as case studies elaborating best and worst cases for different mitigation and adaption strategies, and since these diverse solutions need diverse input from politicians, citizens, intellects, and artists, there will also be investigations of why the strategies may or may not work from social, environmental, and economic factors.