Yearly Archives ⇒ 2022

George Lakey on people power in Ukraine

February 25, 2022
· Martin Kelley

The Quak­er activist looks back at non­vi­o­lent resis­tance strug­gles to pre­vi­ous super­pow­er inva­sions in places like 1968 Czecho­slo­va­kia and 1940s Denmark.

What strikes me as extra­or­di­nary about these and oth­er suc­cess­ful cas­es is that the non­vi­o­lent com­bat­ants engaged in their strug­gle with­out the ben­e­fit of train­ing. What army com­man­der would order troops into com­bat with­out train­ing them first? 

We’ve been talk­ing about these kinds of resis­tance in peace cir­cles for decades and kudos to Gene Sharp, who cat­e­go­rized a lot of the tech­niques, and Eri­ca Chenoweth, who has done a lot more recent work. When peo­ple doubt that paci­fism can work, we can turn to this research to prove it does — or can. The trou­ble is the body count can get high. Putin’s not an empa­thet­ic guy and it seems his para­noia and mega­lo­ma­nia is get­ting worse. I’m wor­ried that he’s not above an extend­ed blood­bath if it feeds his vision of a greater Russian.

https://​wag​ingnon​vi​o​lence​.org/​2​0​2​2​/​0​2​/​u​k​r​a​i​n​e​-​d​o​e​s​n​t​-​n​e​e​d​-​t​o​-​m​a​t​c​h​-​r​u​s​s​i​a​s​-​m​i​l​i​t​a​r​y​-​m​i​g​h​t​-​t​o​-​d​e​f​e​n​d​-​a​g​a​i​n​s​t​-​i​n​v​a​s​i​on/

War is (still) not the answer

February 25, 2022
· Martin Kelley

Over on Friends Jour­nal, we’re reshar­ing this 2014 inter­view with Diane Ran­dall, who was then head of Friends Com­mit­tee on Nation­al Legislation.

Diane’s suc­ces­sor Brid­get Moix, has writ­ten a State­ment on Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine. These kinds of state­ments always depress me because they’re always so pre­dictable — war is stu­pid, we’re Quak­ers, we believe in peace, every­one should back off of the war — but what else can you do? The truth is the truth, no mat­ter how many times we have to repeat it. Rinse and repeat as nations con­tin­ue to use mil­i­tary force to oppress others.

War is Not the Answer

Quakers, slavery, and sugar

February 2, 2022
· Martin Kelley

On The­Con­ver­sa­tion, a look at how 18th-century Quak­ers led a boy­cott of sug­ar to protest against slav­ery, from Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty prof Julie L. Hol­comb. This is part of a series exam­in­ing “sugar’s effects on human health and culture.”

In the late 17th and ear­ly 18th cen­turies, only a few Quak­ers protest­ed African slav­ery. Indeed, indi­vid­ual Quak­ers who did protest, like Lay, were often dis­owned for their actions because their activism dis­rupt­ed the uni­ty of the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty. Begin­ning in the 1750s, Quak­ers’ sup­port for slav­ery and the prod­ucts of slave labor start­ed to erode, as reform­ers like Quak­er John Wool­man urged their co-religionists in the North Amer­i­can Colonies and Eng­land to bring about change. 

None of this will be new to reg­u­lar read­ers of Friends Jour­nal and Lar­ry Ingle reviewed Hol­com­b’s book for us in 2017. But it is inter­est­ing to think about the eco­nom­ic aspects both of ear­ly Friends’ embrace of slav­ery in Bar­ba­dos and Penn­syl­va­nia and also of the abo­li­tion­ists’ boy­cott tac­tics. These days orga­ni­za­tions like the Earth Quak­er Action Team con­tin­ue to com­bine social wit­ness with strate­gic eco­nom­ic pressure.


How 18th-century Quakers led a boycott of sugar to protest against slavery

How 18th-century Quak­ers led a boy­cott of sug­ar to protest against slavery 

Eighteenth-century Quak­ers attempt­ed to align their reli­gious beliefs with what they pur­chased. These Quak­ers led some of the…

The Conversation The Conversation 

Back to Fox

January 28, 2022
· Martin Kelley

Johan Mau­r­er is revis­it­ing Fox’s Jour­nal as he copy­ed­its a Russ­ian translation

This task of edit­ing the Russ­ian trans­la­tion has brought me face to face once again with this unapolo­get­i­cal­ly bold wit­ness and his raw tes­ti­mo­ny. What am I to do with him? How is he a mod­el or mea­sure for the Friends move­ment today? Do we have among us — do we endure among us — those who might make such bold claims … to be empow­ered with God’s mes­sage to the same degree as the orig­i­nal writ­ers of Scrip­ture?… to be per­fect­ly redeemed from temp­ta­tion? … to lead peo­ple into the same place where he was, so that they could have the same access to God’s spir­it that he claimed to have? 

Wess Daniels: The good wine is now

January 28, 2022
· Martin Kelley

From: The Wine Gave Out

When I look back at the time in that library in Eng­land where it appeared that maybe Quak­erism was already dead, I found out­side those walls a move­ment of the Spir­it that was renew­ing Friends, lead­ing Friends in faith­ful­ness to chal­lenge their year­ly meet­ing struc­tures and the exclu­sion of some of God’s chil­dren, new meet­ings aris­ing to meet con­tem­po­rary needs, and young peo­ple tak­ing lead­er­ship roles often reserved for Quak­ers twice their age. There is good wine among Friends being faith­ful to Jesus. 

It seems to me that his­to­ry became a par­tic­u­lar­ly favorite Quak­er past time for two rea­sons: our avoid­ance of any­thing resem­bling a creed, and our post-schism desire to authen­ti­cate “our brand” of Quak­erism as the “real Quakerism.”

As the Friends move­ment splin­tered into a dozen or com­pet­ing sects in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry (most notably espe­cial­ly Hick­site vs. Gur­neyite vs. Wilbu­rite), we could mine and inter­pret the his­to­ry of “ear­ly Friends” to divine which branch they would have favored. And by col­lect­ing and inter­pret­ing old Quak­er jour­nals and epis­tles we could map out an “authen­tic” Quak­er set of beliefs and practices.

The prob­lem is that most ear­ly Friends didn’t go about to cre­ate a new sect: they were Chris­tians get­ting back to the basics. Part of the thrill of hear­ing George Fox’s ser­mons is that he wasn’t just recit­ing or proof-texting scrip­ture, but speak­ing it as if it were new and fresh and true. That’s hard to do. I know I often reach for the rhetor­i­cal crutch of the “ear­ly Quak­ers,” but the irony is that those very Friends weren’t stuck on his­to­ry. I think part of this is a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ty: those of us brought up in West­ern aca­d­e­m­ic tra­di­tions think about time and change dif­fer­ent­ly than mid-seventeenth cen­tu­ry British sheep­herders. But as Wess points out, it’s just as much a result of wine that’s sat out too long and gone a bit vinegary.