CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/6/2025

The inexplicable magnetism of the Shakers

“There’s something romantic about the Shakers,” essayist Sarah Margolis-Pineo writes in new release, The Shakers: A World in the Making. It may seem odd to apply the idea of romance to a sect of celibate, semi-separatist, religious radicals, but there’s a distinctive allure at play here—an inexplicable magnetism that has attracted generations of the ‘World’s People,’ from curiosity seekers and scholars to antiquarians and artists. Today, as nations are on fire, oppressive regimes rise to power and alienation and loneliness have been declared public heath crises, the Shaker legacy of building more meaningful lives—together, in community—is all the more captivating and, in fact, urgent. Brother Arnold Hadd, one of the two practicing Shakers in the United States, likes to remind us that Shakers are simply ordinary people living extraordinary lives. Indeed, Shakers are world makers. Since the eighteenth century, Believers have led purposeful lives rooted in the divine values of simplicity, harmony and equality—what many scholars have called ‘heavenly blueprints.’” Featured here, an elder’s rocking chair, c. 1850–70, made of maple, birch and rush weave.