Shaker worship
Jeannine Lauber was a TV news anchor and reporter in Portland, Maine, when she attended her first Shaker worship service 15 years ago. Having recently moved north from Ohio, she was looking for a church to join. Though Lauber, raised Catholic, did not become a full-fledged member - there was no vow of celibacy or move to the communal quarters - she became a regular at the weekly service.
Over the years Lauber got to know the four remaining Shakers in America. Her conversations with them ranged from pacifism and other tenets of the faith to the skyrocketing prices paid at auction for the finest examples of Shaker furniture.
Lauber’s new book “Chosen Faith, Chosen Land: The Untold Story of America’s 21st Century Shakers’’ (Down East) is at once an intimate and sweeping view of a frequently misunderstood faith. Photographs by Jeff Toorish focus on the graceful simplicity of the Shaker lifestyle and the pastoral landscape around Sabbathday Lake.
Though the nation’s last Shaker community is down to three members, Lauber is hopeful that its central beliefs will endure. She writes that she sees “a mirror image of America’s Shaker faith’’ in the growing numbers of Christians who reject traditional churches in pursuit of a new understanding of God. That, after all, was what Ann Lee did in founding the Shaker church a few hundred years ago.
The role of psychiatric hospital as muse will be explored in a new course, “Residencies at the Asylum: Poets at McLean Hospital,’’ being offered next month in Newton. The teacher is Doug Holder, a poet who led poetry groups at McLean Hospital for 10 of the 27 years he worked there. Details at www.newtoncommun ityed.org.
■“Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession,’’ by Julie Powell (Little, Brown)
■“Trial by Fire,’’ by J.A. Jance (Touchstone)
Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com. 
