Showing posts with label hippies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hippies. Show all posts

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Jesus Is Just All Right, Part Two: The Trees Community

This is an article I wrote in the summer of 2008 as a sequel to this unexpectedly controversial article. It never got published, so I thought I'd trot it out here. The music is fantastic.

In the late 1960s, a TV production consultant named William "Shipen" Lebzelter "dropped out" of his life and moved into an abandoned fourth-floor loft in the East Village. Then, together with his close friend Phillip "Ariel" Dross, Shipen embarked on a spiritual quest, exploring disciplines like Kundalini Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism before, in his own words he was, "knocked by Christ off [his] horse."

Shipen's loft, already a meeting place for young village people caught up in the hippie commune vibes of the late 60's, soon became a center for born again Christians (sometimes as many as forty) to meet, pray and meditate.