Yearly Archives ⇒ 2023

Updating QuakerQuaker

January 4, 2023
· Martin Kelley

I just sent out a mes­sage on Quak­erQuak­er about retool­ing it for the mod­ern age:

I’m not one to make New Years res­o­lu­tions most of the time but it seems as if mod­ern­iz­ing Quak­erQuak­er should be one for 2023. While it still boasts over 3,700 mem­bers, it’s built on Ning, a long-outdated and semi-abandoned plat­form that has any num­ber of frus­trat­ing tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions. Quak­erQuak­er isn’t used as much as it should be, even by its members.

Reimag­in­ing Quak­erQuak­er and set­ting up the tools to make it work will cost some mon­ey. Please con­sid­er fund­ing Quak­erQuak­er and its evo­lu­tion for 2023, either as a month­ly dona­tion or a one-time gift. Also I’m open to emails with ideas about what you’d like to see (I’m imag­in­ing some­thing that’s more mod­est but also more used).

I had a much-longer orig­i­nal draft that detailed all the rea­sons why Ning is hope­less­ly inad­e­quate in 2023 but it was nixed by my Advance­ment Direc­tor (okay, my wife as she sits next to me at the table work­ing on home­school cur­ric­u­la). Suf­fice it to say that I’ve let Quak­erQuak­er stay in a kind of sta­sis because I did­n’t want to lose some great com­ment threads. The best ones could be eas­i­ly archived. I have a day job pro­duc­ing great Quak­er con­tent but there are still ways to reboot Quak­erQuak­er and make it a use­ful des­ti­na­tion for infor­ma­tion and con­ver­sa­tion that com­ple­ments oth­er Quak­er online spaces.

Quaker sing song ministry

January 4, 2023
· Martin Kelley

Over on Mastodon (yes you should be there), Aus­tralian Friend Evan start­ed an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about Quak­er sing song. This is a form of deliv­er­ing min­istry that seems to date back to the begin­nings of our reli­gious soci­ety but which bare­ly exists any­more. To my untrained ears it sounds more like some­thing you’d hear in a small Catholic or Ortho­dox church. Many years ago Haver­ford Col­lege Library excerpt­ed a field record­ing on a page ded­i­cat­ed to Music and the Ear­ly Quak­ers:

Evan posts to a pas­sage on it from nineteenth-century Quak­er chron­i­cler Thomas Clark­son:

The Quak­ers, on the oth­er hand, nei­ther pre­pare their dis­cours­es, nor vary their voic­es pur­pose­ly accord­ing to the rules of art. The tone which comes out, and which appears dis­agree­able to those who are not used to it, is nev­er­the­less not unnat­ur­al. It is rather the mode of speak­ing which na- ture impos­es in any vio­lent exer­tion of the voice, to save the lungs. Hence per­sons who have their wares to cry, and this almost every oth­er minute in the streets, are oblig­ed to adopt a tone. Hence per­sons, with dis­or­dered lungs, can sing words with more ease to them­selves than they can utter th6m with a sim­i­lar pitch of the voice. Hence Quaker- women, when they preach, have gen­er­al­ly more of this tone than the Quaker-men, for the lungs of the female are gen­er­al­ly weak­er than those of the oth­er
sex.

I’ve always won­dered if lat­er oppo­si­tion to sing song might have been par­tial­ly moti­vat­ed by the fact that it was favored by women or sound­ed a bit too Catholic for Angli­cans like Clark­son or Quak­ers lean­ing that direction.

There’s a great 2011 post from the now-dormant Quak­er His­tor­i­cal Lex­i­con blog by Illi­nois Friend Peter Laser­sohn. The com­ments are also great.