“One aspect of sustainability that has particular importance for me personally concerns what we eat and how it is made. While the pitiful lives of animals in factory farms have been well-documented, what is also becoming more well-known is the tremendous impact eating animal products has on the environment.”
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Yearly Archives ⇒ 2018
YouTube star Jessica Kellgren-Fozard on her Quakerism
July 20, 2018
Jessica Kellgren-Fozard is a disabled TV presenter with 266,000+ followers on YouTube. She’s also a lifelong Friend from the UK. She’s just released a video in which she talks about her understanding of Quakerism. It’s pretty good. She occasionally implies that some specifically British procedural process is intrinsic to all Quakers but other than that it all rings true, certainly to her experience as a UK Friend.
I must admit that the world of YouTube stars is foreign to me. This is essentially a webcam vlog post but the lighting and hair and costuming is meticulous. Her notes include affiliate links for the dress she’s wearing ($89 and yes, they ship internationally), a 8 1/2 minute video tutorial about curling you hair in her vintage style (it has over 33,000 views). If you follow her on Instagram and Twitter you’ll soon have enough details on lipstick and shoe choices to be able to fully cosplay her.
But don’t laugh too much, because in between the self presentation tips, Kellgren-Fozard tackles really hard subjects – growing up gay in school, living with disabilities – in ways that are approachable and intimate, funny and instructive. And with a quarter million YouTube followers, she’s reaching people with a message of kindness and inclusion and understanding that feels pretty Quakerly to me. Margaret Fell liked herself a red dress sometimes and it’s easy to argue George Fox would be a YouTuber today.
Bonus: Jessica Kellgren-Fozard will host a live Q&A chat on her Quakerism this coming Monday. If I’m calculating my timezones correctly, it’ll be noon here on the U.S. East Coast. I plan to tune in.
What do Quaker believe anyway?
July 19, 2018
Answer quickly: what are three things Quakers believe? Unless you’ve practiced an answer to this question, chances are you’ll end up with a lot of umm’s and ahh’s and sentences so built up with disclaimers that your listener has to start sentence diagramming just to figure out if you actually answered. Arthur Larrabee got frustrated by the seemingly impossible task for explaining modern Quaker beliefs and decided to do something about it:
About 9 years ago I began to give voice to a lifelong frustration of mine. The frustration was that I cannot answer the question “What do Quakers believe?” I would always answer the questions somewhat defensively. I would say, “it’s kind of hard to know what Quakers believe, but let me tell you what I believe.” Or I would say, “well, it’s hard to know what Quakers believe today but let me tell you what Quakers believed at the beginning.” Or I would say what I thought Quakers believed and I would hope that no one else was listening because I did not want to be overcalled.
I think Arthur does a pretty good job tackling a very tough task. He barely even mentions Howard Brinton’s “SPICES.”
http://quakerspeak.com/9‑core-quaker-beliefs/
William Penn: commemorations and curios
July 19, 2018
The 300th anniversary of William Penn’s death is close at hand and archivists in the British Quaker library share a post about their collection of Penn curios:
The archival material in the Library relating to William Penn includes property deeds relating to land in Pennsylvania, such as the one pictured below. There are also letters from William Penn amongst other people’s papers. One notable example, dated 13th of 11th month 1690 (13 January 1691, in the modern calendar), is a letter from him to Margaret Fox, formerly Margaret Fell, telling her of the death of her husband, George Fox.
It sounds like there have been lots of momentos made from the elm tree under which William Penn is said to have signed a treaty with the Lenape in 1683. The Penn Treaty Park museum has stirring accounts of the storm that tore the tree from its roots in 1810. There were so many relic hunters hacking off pieces of the fallen tree that the owners of the property owners hired a guard. Their solution was the obvious capitalist one: chop the remainder up and sell it.
According to an article on the Haverford College site, cuttings of the original tree were taken in its lifetime and trees have been propagated from its lineage for a few generations now. Haverford recently planted a “great grandchild” of the original treaty elm on its campus to replace a fallen grandchild. Newtown Meeting in nearby Bucks County has a great great grandchild.
The idea of Quaker relics and trees imbued with special properties because of a lineage of placement doesn’t really jive very well with many Friends’ ideas of the Quaker testimonies. But I’m glad that the treaty is remembered. The tree had served as a sort of memorial; with its demise, a group came together to more properly remember the location and commemorate the treaty.
Dynamics of Evil
July 16, 2018
From Patricia Dallmann:
Holding the line, speaking the truth is the Christian’s (Quaker’s) obligation in the Lamb’s War. If the God of truth is honored in just one mind, heart, and soul, the world is not lost, as Jesus showed us by prototypal example. In this statement given before Pilate shortly before the end of his earthly life, Jesus identified his life’s purpose not only for himself but for us all.
https://patradallmann.wordpress.com/2018/07/01/dynamics-of-evil/
Peterson Toscano is a reluctant minister
July 12, 2018
This week’s featured article over at Friends Journal is Peterson Toscano’s “A Reluctant Minister.”
Satire and irony, especially when it is subtle, done in character, or relies on tone can be misunderstood when taken literally. Friends can get so caught up in the words that we miss the point. It is never fun explaining a joke to a Friend, but even that interaction is part of the work of presenting performance art for Quakers. We are committed to fairness and love. Comedy can be used to hurt others or to make light of serious issues. Unpacking a joke can lead to rich discussion. I seek to use comedy to shed light on important issues. Still, some Friends prefer the straightforward message over the comic performance.
I really appreciate the care and honesty that Peterson has put into defining his work. It would be so easy for him to label his performance art as ministry and wear it as a cloak of respectability. Much of his work does indeed act as ministry and he uses a clearness committee as a Quaker discernment tool. But he wants to keep a space open for what you might call artistic confusion and so describes himself as a “theatrical performance activist.”
When the pendulum began trend toward re-embracing the ideas of ministry within Liberal Quakerism some years back, many forms of public work started being labeled ministry. It might be a sign of the incompleteness of our follow-through that few of the people coming forward with ministries felt comfortable calling themselves ministers. I like the idea of keeping middle-ground spaces that we don’t try to artificially kludge into classic Quaker models.
Friends Journal QuakerSpeak on old Quaker records
July 12, 2018
I must admit to loving old libraries and geeking out on histories. In this week’s installment of QuakerSpeak, Mary Crauderueff, curator at Haverford College’s Quaker Collection, talks about some of the favorite parts of her work:
You have things like membership records, marriage records, and marriage certificates. You have minutes of the business meetings and you have committee minutes. Other cool things that we have are deeds for meetings and meetinghouses. People will sometimes come to various Quaker archives and say, “Our meeting is in this dispute with the township. We need to find the original deed to the meetinghouse and we think that you have it. Can we look at it?”
http://Quakerspeak.com/working-in-a-historical-quaker-library/
Worship Sharing and Vocal Ministry
July 9, 2018
Worship Sharing and Vocal Ministry
Very often, if we had just heard the lesson without its personal and often anecdotal preamble, it would have felt much more like Spirit-led vocal ministry. So why quibble about it? Because, by the time we get the lesson, it is so saturated with “I” that it has trouble lifting off the ground to transform the We. Our consciousness has been so deeply drawn into personality that it hinders the transpersonal character we hope for in vocal ministry.