I really should blog here more. I really should. I spend a lot of my time these days sharing other people’s ideas. Most recently, on Friends Journal you can see my interview with Jon Watts (co-conducted with Megan Kietzman-Nicklin). The three of us talked on and on for quite some time; it was only an inflexible train schedule that ended my participation.
The favorite part of talking with Jon is his enthusiasm and his talent for keeping his sights set on the long picture (my favorite question was asking why he started with a Quaker figure so obscure even I had to look him up). It’s easy to get caught up in the bustle of deadlines and to-do lists and to start to forget why we’re doing this work as professional Quakers. There is a reality behind the word counts. As Friends, we are sharing the good news of 350+ years of spiritual adventuring: observations, struggles, and imperfect-but-genuine attempts to follow Inward Light of the Gospels.
My nine year old son Theo is blogging as a class assignment. I think they’ve been supposed to be writing there for awhile but he’s really only gotten the bug in the last few weeks. It’s a full-on WordPress site, but with certain restrictions (most notably, posts only become public after the classroom teacher has had a chance to review and vet them). It’s certain ironic to see one of my kids blogging more than me!
Enough blogging for today. Time to put the rest of the awake kids to bed. I’m going to try to have more regular small posts so as to get back into the blogging habit. In the meantime, I’m always active on my Tumblr site (which shows up as the sidebar to the right). It’s the bucket for my internet curations – videos and links I find interesting, and my own pictures and miscellanea.
To translate, SEO is “search engine optimization,” the often-huckersterish art of tricking Google to display your website higher than your competitors in search results. “Usability” is the catch-all term for making your website easy to navigate and inviting to visitors. Companies with deep pockets often want to spend a lot of money on SEO, when most of the time the most viable long-term solution to ranking high with search engines is to provide visitors with good reasons to visit your site. What if we applied these principles to our churches and meetinghouses and swapped the terms?
Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning.
A lot of Quaker meetinghouses have pretty good “natural SEO.” Here in the U.S. East Coast, they’re often near a major road in the middle of town. If they’re lucky there are a few historical markers of notable Quakers and if they are really lucky there’s a highly-respected Friends school nearby. All these meetings really have to do is put a nice sign out front and table a few town events every year. The rest is covered. Although we do get the occasional “aren’t you all Amish?” comments, we have a much wider reputation that our numbers would necessarily warrant. We rank pretty high.
But what are the lessons of hospitality we could work on? Do we provide places where spiritual seekers can both grow personally and engage in the important questions of the faith in the modern world? Are we invitational, bringing people into our homes and into our lives for shared meals and conversations?
In my freelance days when I was hired to work on SEO I ran through a series of statistical reports and redesigned some underperforming pages, but then turned my attention to the client’s content. It was in this realm that my greatest quantifiable successes occurred. At the heart of the content work was asking how could the site could more fully engage with first-time visitors. The “usability considerations” on the Wikipedia page on usability could be easily adapted as queries:
Who are the users, what do they know, what can they learn? What do users want or need to do? What is the users’ general background? What is the users’ context for working? What must be left to the machine? Can users easily accomplish intended tasks at their desired speed? How much training do users need? What documentation or other supporting materials are available to help the user?
I’d love to see Friends consider this more. FGC’s “New Meetings Toolbox” has a section on welcoming newcomers. But I’d love to hear more stories about how we’re working on the “usability” of our spiritual communities.
“Old Zinc Factory; Palmerton” by road_less_trvled on Flickr (creative commons license)
When I was growing up we’d make the trip from Philadelphia to my grandmother’s house a couple of times a year. As we headed north, the highway threaded across farm fields and through rock cuts in the hills. About an hour in, we’d start noticing the thin blue band on the horizon. It would slowly get larger and larger until Blue Mountain loomed in front of us and we whooshed into Lehigh Tunnel.
My Nana lived on the other side of that mountain. On this side the mountainside was red. The forests that carpeted the rest of the thousand-mile ridge had been ripped up by the decades of chemicals pouring out if the smokestacks of the giant zinc processing factories that bookended the town of Palmerton.
When conversation turned to adult matters, I’d wander to the back porch and count the dirt bike trails going up the barren mountain. When I tired of that I’d play in the stones of my grandmother’s backyard. Even grass didn’t grow in this town. Ambitious homeowners would sometimes make rock gardens for the space in front of each house that had been designed for marigolds, but most of the town had gotten used to the absence of green. When the EPA finally got around to declaring the mountain a superfund site we all snorted dismissively. My grandmother was actually offended, having long ago convinced herself that the factory effusions must be healthy.
The Palmerton factories were funded by New York bankers. Princeton University got multiple multimillion-dollar bequests in the wills of the founders of the zinc company. I’m sure there are still a few residual trust funds paying out dividends.
Today we have Philadelphia and Pittsburgh bankers orchestrating the removal of the mountaintops in West Virginia. As our technology has improved so has our capacity for ill-considered mass destruction of our natural surroundings.
All living creatures have an impact on their surroundings. My comforts rely on the coal, oil, and natural gas that are brought into our cities and towns. But I do know we can do better. I’m optimistic enough to can find ways to live together on this Earth that don’t break our mountains or poison our neighbors.
Ten years ago today, U.S. forces began the “shock and awe” bombardment on Baghdad, the first shots of the second Iraq War. President Bush said troops needed to go in to disable Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program, but as we now know that program did not exist. Many of us suspected as much at the time. The flimsy pieces of evidence held up by the Bush Administration didn’t pass the smell test but a lot of mainstream reporters went for it and supported the war.
Now those journalists are looking back. One is Andrew Sullivan, most widely known as the former editor of New Republic and now the publisher of the independent online magazine The Dish. I find his recent “Never Forget That They Were All Wrong” thread profoundly frustrating. I’m glad he’s taking the time to double-guess himself, but the whole premise of the thread continues the dismissive attitude toward activists. Starting in 1995 I ran a website that acted as a publishing platform for much of the established peace movement. Yes, we were a collection of antiwar activists, but that doesn’t mean we were unable to use logic and apply critical thinking when the official assurances didn’t add up. I wrote weekly posts challenging New York Times reporter Judith Miller and the smoke-and-mirror shows of two administrations over a ten-year period. My essays were occasionally picked up by the national media — when they needed a counterpoint to pro-war editorials — but in general my pieces and those of the pacifist groups I published were dismissed.
When U.S. troops finally did invade Iraq in 2003, they encountered an Iraqi military that was almost completely incapacitated by years of U.N. sanctions. The much-hyped Republican Guard had tanks that had too many broken parts to run. Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological programs had been shut down over a decade earlier. The real lesson that we should take from the Iraq War was that the nonviolent methods of United Nations sanctions had worked. This isn’t a surprise for what we might call pragmatic pacifists. There’s a growing body of research arguing that nonviolent methods are often more effective than armed interventions (see for example, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, reviewed in the March Friends Journal (subscription required).
What if the U.S. had acknowledge there was no compelling evidence of WMDs and had simply ratcheted up the sanctions and let Iraq stew for another couple of years? Eventually a coup or Arab Spring would probably have rolled around. Imagine it. No insurgency. No Abu Ghraib. Maybe we’d even have an ally in Baghdad. The situations in places like Tehran, Damascus, Islamabad, and Ramallah would probably be fundamentally different right now. Antiwar activists were right in 2003. Why should journalists like Andrew Sullivan assume that this was an anomaly?
“What do you think of this?” It was probably the twentieth time my brother or I had asked this question in the last hour. Our mother had downsized to a one-bedroom apartment in an Alzheimer’s unit just six days earlier. Visiting her there she admitted she couldn’t even remember her old apartment. We were cleaning it out.
Almost forgotten history. by martin_kelley, on Flickr
The object of the question this time was an antique teapot. White china with a blue design. It wasn’t in great shape. The top was cracked and missing that handle that lets you take the lid off without burning your fingers. It had a folksy charm, but as a teapot it was neither practical nor astonishingly attractive, and neither of us really wanted it. It was headed for the oversized trash bin outside her room.
I turned it over in my hands. There, on the bottom, was a strip of dried-out and cracked masking tape. On it, barely legible and in the kind of cursive script that is no longer taught, were the words “Recovered from ruins of fire 6/29/23 at 7. 1067 Hazard Rd.”
We scratched our heads. We didn’t know where Hazard Road might be (Google later revealed it’s in the blink-and-you-miss-it railroad stop of Hazard, Pennsylvania, a crossroads only technically within the boundary of our mother’s home town of Palmerton). The date would place the fire seven years before her birth.
We can only guess to fill in the details. A catastrophic fire must have taken out the family home. Imagine the grim solace of pulling out a family heirloom. Perhaps some grandparent had brought it carefully packed in a small suitcase on the journey to America. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it had no sentimental value and it had landed with our mother because no one else cared. We’ll never know. No amount of research could tell us more than that masking tape. Our mother wasn’t the only one losing her memory. We were too. We were losing the family memory of a generation that had lived, loved, and made it through a tragedy one mid-summer day.
I stood there and looked at the teapot once again. It had survived a fire ninety years ago. I would give it a reprieve from our snap judgement and the dump. Stripped of all meaning save three inches of masking tape, it now sits on a top shelf of my cupboard. It will rest there, gathering back the dust I just cleaned off, until some spring afternoon forty years from now, when one of my kids will turn to another. “What do you think of this?”
Update March 2017
Probably the oldest picture of Liz I have, from 1931. Elizabeth “Lizzie” “Grammy” Williams Noll, Elizabeth Kleintop, Puerette “Puri” “Pappy” Noll. On porch of Columbia Ave. home, Palmerton.
Beyond all odds, there’s actually more information. Someone has put up obituaries from the Morning Call newspaper. It includes the May 1922 notice for Alvin H. Noll, my mother’s great grandfather.
Alvin H. Noll, a well known resident of Palmerton, died at his home, at that place, on Sunday morning, aged 66 years. He was a member of St. John’s church, Towamensing, and also a prominent member of Lodge, No. 440, I.O. of A., Bowmanstown. He is survived by two daughters, Mrs. Lewis Sauerwine, Slatington, and Mrs. Fred Parry, this city; three sons, Purietta Noll, Samuel Noll and Thomas Noll, Palmerton. Two sisters, Mrs. Mary Schultz, Lehighton; Miss Amanda Noll, Bowmanstown; two brothers, Aaron Noll, Bowmanstown, and William Noll, Lehighton. Ten grandchildren also survive. Funeral services will be held at the home of his son, Purietta (sic) Noll, 1067 Hazard Road, Palmerton, on Wednesday at 1.30 p.m., daylight saving time. Further services will be held in St. John’s church, Towamensing. Interment will be made in Towamensing cemetery.
And there it is: 1067 Hazard Road, home of my mother’s grandfather Puriette Franklin Noll one year before the fire. So I’ll add a picture of Puriette and his wife Elizabeth with my Mom eighter years after the fire, at what the photo says is their Columbia Avenue home. Wow!
The Hipster Conservative writes the definitive guide. This is a bit close for comfort but we’re supposed to be able to laugh at ourselves, right?
Explain the personal conflict you experience between your evangelical roots and what you now truly believe is a devastating challenge to those formerly-held beliefs. Suggest that instead of being so quick to oppose the issue, Christians should extend “grace” (don’t define) and a “generous response.” Above all, they should “re-evaluate” their views in light of this challenge. Remember: “Questioning” is a one-way street.
“When I came here to learn more about the wider Christian world, I realized that people are interested in learning more about Quakers and what we have to offer other denominations.”
