One thing I love about the inter­net and blogs is that they’re open­ing up dis­cus­sions in the Quak­er world. Infor­ma­tion and dia­log that was once con­fined to a small group of insid­ers is opened up to what we might only-half jok­ing­ly label “the laity.” The lat­est few entries to Quak­erQuak­er show this in operation. 

Last mon­th’s annu­al ses­sions of Bal­ti­more Year­ly Meet­ing (the region­al body for Friends those parts) were marked by an impor­tant report from its rep­re­sen­ta­tives to Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing, an inter­na­tion­al body of Friends that Bal­ti­more belongs to but has a com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with. Atten­dees at the year­ly meet­ing ses­sion heard the report, of course, and news trick­led out in var­i­ous ways (one vis­i­tor IM’ed me that day with the briefest sketch). 

Enter the inter­net. At some point Bal­ti­more put the report up on their web­site. The infor­ma­tion was there but there’s no oppor­tu­ni­ty for dis­cus­sion as the BYM web­site has no com­ment­ing fea­ture. I post­ed the report up to Quak­erQuak­er and with­in a few hours, Johan Mau­r­er was on top of it. Johan used to be the chief exec­u­tive of Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing and a wide expe­ri­ence with Friends from across the Quak­er the­o­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al spec­trum. He’s also an active blog­ger and he post­ed a reply, What is real­ly wrong with FUM, part two: the Bal­ti­more YM report, that I find par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful. His blog has com­ments. I’ve put Johan’s post up on Quak­erQuak­er and we now have a forum to try to tease apart the range of issues in the Bal­ti­more report: lead­er­ship, the­ol­o­gy, inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, etc. How cool is that?

PS: I linked to the Wikipedia arti­cles on Bal­ti­more and Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing. Has any­one else noticed Wikipedia makes a much more acces­si­ble intro­duc­tion to Quak­er bod­ies than their own websites?