The August issue of Friends Jour­nal is avail­able online. There’s no theme to this issue, which makes it kind of a “Best of” for the arti­cles we’ve received over the late spring. It’s hard to pick favorites but I’m real­ly excit­ed by Michael Lev­i’s “White Suprema­cy Cul­ture in My Clerk­ing.”

Anoth­er favorite is Jean Soder­lund’s look at Lenape Peo­ple, Quak­ers, and peace in the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry. I reached out to Jean after read­ing her 2015 book, Lenape Coun­try: Delaware Val­ley Soci­ety Before William Penn. On of her the­ses was that a lot of the cul­ture of peace that we’ve attrib­uted to Penn­syl­va­nia Quak­ers was already well in place along both shores of the Delaware Riv­er long before Pen­n’s arrival, nego­ti­at­ed by the Lenape who pro­tect­ed it through a suc­ces­sion of Dutch and Swedish set­tle­ments and gov­er­nors. As I wrote in my open­ing col­umn this month:

Friends have often spent a lot of time think­ing about Quak­er cul­ture and jus­ti­fy­ing it to our­selves and oth­ers. Our his­to­ries and the sto­ries we tell about our­selves have often been craft­ed to pro­vide a uni­fied vision for who we should be now. It’s a con­tin­u­al process, and sto­ry­telling con­tin­ues to shape our self-image today.

“Who Do We Think We Are?”

I think a lot of what has become Amer­i­can Quak­er cul­ture was forged in the first fifty years of Philadelphia-area gov­ern­ing and that if we’re to under­stand who we are now, it helps to under­stand how a band of per­se­cut­ed rad­i­cals in Eng­land adapt­ed to becom­ing landown­ers, col­o­niz­ers, and gov­er­nors over a some­times unwill­ing land of Lenape, Swedes, Dutch, Finns and non-Quaker English.