Real­ly excit­ed to see my friend Patri­cia Dall­man­n’s new book is avail­able! It’s called The Light That Is Giv­en. I read a pre-publication PDF ver­sion and was asked by the pub­lish­er to give a blurb. Here’s what I wrote: 

Patri­cia Dall­mann brings a mod­ern prophet­ic voice to Scrip­ture and ancient Friends’ texts. She care­ful­ly exam­ines the lan­guage of these sto­ries and brings new life to their teach­ings, but this is no exer­cise in mim­ic­ry. Dall­mann shares her own expe­ri­ences and shows us how tra­di­tion­al Quak­er beliefs have guid­ed her. This is an invalu­able resource for those want­i­ng to explore how tra­di­tion­al Friends’ faith and prac­tice can be lived out by spir­i­tu­al seek­ers today.

I see from Ama­zon that Dou­glas Gwyn and Stu­art Mas­ters gave even bet­ter blurbs so I’m in good company! 

It’s a great sum­mer for tra­di­tion­al Quak­er books, with this and Christo­pher Stern’s new mem­oir. I was­n’t able to make his book talk at the FGC Gath­er­ing last week but hope to catch up on it. I did final­ly pick up a copy of 2015’s Tra­di­tion­al Quak­er Chris­tian­i­ty to add to my list of books I real­ly real­ly want to read. This week I fin­ished Jean Soder­lund’s Lenape Coun­try: Delaware Val­ley Soci­ety Before William Penn, which dis­tills a lot of the myths of Penn and Quak­ers (she’ll have an arti­cle on some of this in the August issue of FJ!).