On quiet Sunday mornings in rural Maine, a small group of Shakers still gathers in the sturdy timber-framed meetinghouse at Sabbathday Lake to celebrate their spiritual gifts and lead communal singing. The group hosts friends from the area for shared worship in their village community, as they have done since the eighteenth century. Their remarkably preserved 1794 meetinghouse-like others designed and built by the early Shakers across the region-has been not only a passive, venerable witness to the long arc of Shaker history but also a ritual participant, shaping movement and song into exuberant millennial praise (Figure I).
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