Tag Archives: livability

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”.

Waking from the Good Life; Agrarian Movements and Their Legacy

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For many young people, the threat of climate change looms large in our collective consciousness. Questions that used to characterize young adulthood, like career choice, moving out, and the decision to have children have taken on a surreal quality to them, as many young adults believe that we won’t have a future, economically or biologically. Some choose to address this despair with standard fair nihilism, some by channeling their energy towards social causes and some respond by posting videos of themselves making bread on TikTok. 

Figuring out what do do in response to ecological collapse, overconsumption, economic hardship and disconnection from the land is seemingly part of every young person’s psyche these days, manifesting in the cottagecore aesthetics, frenzy around foraging, and the rise of homemaking and farming media that gain millions of views on social media. And of course, a call to return to the land, to live in agrarian communities, close to neighbors, in harmony with the earth. 

Many young people about to enter the job market joke about moving to the countryside with friends and herding goats, or vegetable farming or any wide variety of agrarian pursuits. We laugh and chuckle. “God, I want that so bad.” “I’m sick of online. I want to disconnect, unplug.” It becomes the kind of joke one tells to alleviate longing. We joke, but we also dream of agrarian utopia, of hard labor, and rightness with nature.

Whatever TikTok and other social media may imply, our generation is not the first to ever think of this radical movement away from the hustle and bustle of modern life. The idea of an agrarian utopia is a common thread throughout the history of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s idea of a yeoman nation of small farmers lie at the heart of much historical republican thought. Amish and Mennonite communities in the U.S. offer a religious version of the same dream. 

More recently in the 1970s, swaths of people moved to rural areas and started co-ops, communes, and intentional communities in what is referred to as the Back to the Land movement. The Back to the Land movement was a part of the social upheaval of the 70s, along with the literature from the Beat Generation, protests against the Vietnam War and second wave feminism. Gary Snyder and other famous thinkers wrote inspiring manifestos about a return to agrarian ideals, local communities, the commune model, and self sufficiency. Importantly, this wasn’t a movement of farming communities reaffirming their livelihood, but people, usually from cities, choosing a separate more ecologically driven lifestyle. 

The dream of the return to nature, back to the land, agrarian utopia is often a far cry from the reality of disconnecting from our modern systems of consumption. There is a reason most of us in the United States think of the Back to the Land movement as failing. Some of these communities still exist, with Maypole Dances, Garlic Festivals and CSAs, but the farmers are aging out of their work, and their children are either not able or interested in continuing their parents’ ideologically driven lifestyle. 

Newcomers to these communities often stay for a few years and then when the stresses of either the work or the chafing of a close community become too difficult to manage, they leave. Agrarian communities that have persisted prior to and after the Back to the Land movement are communities like the Amish, which impose a strict, often religiously backed social code of conduct. The liberal, secular, self-sustaining communities of like minded people that were hoped for in the Back to the Land movement have not remained vibrant. Financial troubles and mass exodus of jobs meant that most communities founded as part of this movement have since been abandoned, farms sold and families departed. 

Given this history, it seems that this recent resurgence of back to the land thought and images of agrarian utopia online are destined either for failure or religious orthodoxy. In light of the climate crisis and the economic fears that hang over this generation, it is worth exploring what it is that caused these previous movements to fall so far from their idealistic beginnings. If we can learn from the past, perhaps we can avoid some of the pitfalls that those before us struggled with. The goal of this project is to explore the rise, success and fall of so-called Back to the Land movements, and unpack both the missteps and virtues of the new online discourse of agrarian utopia. 

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.