Justice Studies Association- Conference SHAKER BREAKOUT SESSION

JSA CONFERENCE- SHAKER BREAKOUT SESSION

THE SHAKER BREAKOUT SESSION

At the end of each conference day, the participants at JSA conferences join in a final plenary session to pick up stones left unturned and address matters that participants feel require more light shed upon them. We call this session—because Justice Studies Association members hold in high esteem the peaceful ways of the Shakers and because of a strange set of organizational circumstances—a Shaker Breakout Session. In any event, the Session provides all an opportunity to reflect on the day and to appreciate, in some cases celebrate, the communal exchanges that took place during the day.

Arthur West, who as a boy lived in the Shaker community in the town of Harvard from 1884 to 1889, wrote in his Reminiscences of Life in a Shaker Village of the “privilege to live as a Shaker, to look out on the world through Shaker eyes, and to be very intimate with those who were scarcely known outside of Shaker Village. Marching in their secluded meetings, sitting in the evening circle, holding the hands of those dear old ladies while they held communion with those departed, the room only dimly lighted with the single-flame oil lamps-under these conditions he came to know the Shakers as they really were.”

In our Shaker Breakout Sessions we have always had adequate lighting, some might prefer to hold hands but all of us sit or stand off to one side of the world in this evening circle, holding communion with our departed perhaps but more so with each other present. Respect presides.

When the American writer William Dean Howells wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly in 1876 called "A Shaker Village" he described the Shaker meeting opening with singing followed by an elder addressing “the brethren and sisters in terms which were commonly a grateful recognition of the beauty of their ‘gospel relation’ to each other, and of their safety from sin in a world of evil.”

If we take Howells’ gospel as good news, the Shaker Breakout Session is a time when we can recognize the good news we have brought to each other during the day, the contributions each has made to make the conference a place where we might reconstitute our lives more toward peace.

And while the concept of being safe from sin in an evil world might sound far too sectarianly religious for many, let us translate it to mean the conference is a forum in which to practice peace in new ways, find comfort and solace as we prepare to go back into a world where so many forces countermand peace in the promotion of sin—power and war.

“'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free, 'tis the gift to come down where you ought to be . . .” Without being a legislature, the Shaker Breakout Session can help put flesh and bone on this ought.

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2009 Eleventh ANNUAL JSA CONFERENCE

Immigration, Sanctuary, Worlds Without Borders

May 27-30, 2009
Albany, New York

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