Reference no: EM133372558
Assignment:
Read the final 2 sections of the chapter slowly. (i) what did the Shakers mean by "living simply?" (ii) What is the "paradox" in the song lyric in Chris Jennings Paradise Now Pages 23-77.
Here are the final 2 sections:
The Shakers' aversion to the world as they found it and their exuberant millenarian hopes combined to liberate them from any regard for the established forms of human association. Within their villages, they built an entirely new kind of society, one founded upon total equality, spiri tual transcendence, and a utopian faith in the perfectibility of life on earth. "We are the people who turned the world upside down," Ann Lee liked to say.
Ultimately, life within Zion was less about what the Shakers did than about what they didn't do-namely, just about everything that might be called "worldly." To them, this state of total abstention-what they called being "simple"-added up to a doctrine of radical freedom: free dom from appetite, from nature, from impulse, and, perhaps most im portant, from the conventions of the World. By scorching out the lusty, scuffling habits of Babylon, the Shakers hoped to perfect and liberate their souls and their community. Their best-known song celebrates this remarkable paradox: "I will bow and be simple. / I will bow and be free."