• Holy Cross Immersion

    Earlier this October, students from Holy Cross came and spent almost a week with us. They helped out across the homestead!

  • Stonehill Book Launch

    Suzanne and Brayton did a book presentation for Loving Life on the Margins: The Story of the Agape Community at Stonehill College on Monday, October 21, 2019.  They visited the Stonehill Farm and Mary Chapel.    

  • An Inspiring Young Person’s Anticipation and Hope

    If you are looking for a handbook to hope and healing amidst the stress of everyday life, look no further than Loving Life on the Margins: The Story of the Agape Community.  This 315-page book, written by husband and wife Brayton Shanley and Suzanne Belote Shanley, serves as both a

  • Loving Life on the Margins • the story of the Agape community

    40 years of Community, Resistance, Nonviolence and Sustainability. Read "Loving Life on the Margins: The Story of the Agape Community" available now! Order online from our website or download an order form to purchase by mail. The book covers the life of its co-founders, Suzanne and Brayton...

  • To Silence a Divine Voice?

    by Brayton Shanley In December 2016, I spent some time at Standing Rock, in North Dakota. I felt called to the Lakota led nonviolent witness against the oil pipeline going through sacred tribal lands of the native people residing there.  Around the sacred fire a tribal leader spoke of a

  • Stopping Short of Emmaus

    by Suzanne Belote Shanley Recently, I read a critique by Alexandra Fuller of memoir as a literary genre: “Most memoir material is best saved for the shrink’s couch. …In order to balance its innate narcissism, a memoir ought to instruct.”  I read these words at a time when Brayton and

  • Loving Life on the Margins: the Story of the Agape Community

    by Suzanne Belote Shanley and Brayton Shanley Reviewed by Thomas Lee, PhD, retired professor, St. Anselm College Suzanne and Brayton Shanley’s compelling book, Loving Life on the Margins: the story of the Agape community goes far beyond a chronological record of the labor-intensive founding and nurture of Agape, their unique

  • For Future Agape Interns: 3 Things to Remember

    by Natalia Luna From March to May 2019, I lived and worked alongside Dixon, Brayton, and Suzanne as an intern at the Agape Community. Partially out of necessity and partially on a whim, I left my life as a student at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester and

  • New Beginnings … or … Spring Has Sprung

    Background: Nicole Braithewaite-Hunt, who was a major contributor, to the past two Francis Days, with her sisters and brothers in the Worcester Inter-Tribal Indian Center to the last two Francis Days at Agape is of Blackfoot and Tuscarora Native American lineage.  Nicole contacted Suzanne to see if Agape would host

  • Jail, an Unusually Noisy Monastery

    by Mark Colville A MARCH, 2019 LETTER FROM MARK COLVILLE FROM THE GLYNN CO. JAIL A member of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, Mark turned himself back into the Glynn County Jail when on December 11th, 2019, after surgery in his home state of CT.  Judge Cheesbro accepted a motion