Over on the Cropwell Meeting website, stories and pictures from a talk George Rubin gave this past weekend. George is a dear friend, a member of Medford (N.J.) Meeting, and a former Friends Journal trustee. But in the winter of 1944 – 45, he was a 19 year old kid from Brooklyn flying through heavy flak in a B‑17G Flying Fortress over Munich. His experiences as a bomber and prisoner of war turned him into a committed pacifist: “Human beings are too precious” he told us. I tried to transcribe as quickly as he spoke, taking pictures in the pauses in between sentences. It’s all quite a story.
Quaker Ranter
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Ten Miles Round
April 1, 2023
I wrote this month’s Friends Journal intro column, “A Humble Band of Prophets”:
I’ve been thinking a lot about that phone call [from a member of a struggling meeting] and about this month’s lead article by Andy Stanton-Henry, who urges us to think about what it would mean to focus our attention on a radius of ten miles. This exact measurement comes from a rousing line from twentieth-century Friend Thomas Kelly: “Such bands of humble prophets can recreate the Society of Friends and the Christian church and shake the countryside for ten miles around.” Kelly in turn got it from seventeenth-century Quaker founder George Fox, who said that anyone raised up as a modern prophet might “shake all the country in their profession for ten miles round.”
Ten miles seems like such a triflingly small distance to us today. It’s a few minutes at highway speeds. The U.S. Census Bureau tells us the average work commute is 27 miles; the Department of Transportation calculates that U.S. drivers average 36 miles per day.
Personal electronic communication has made distance even more meaningless, and it’s easy to build and maintain friendships unbounded by any geography. There’s a mea culpa in this: I’m one of those extremely online people who spends their days in constant communication with people well outside of a ten-mile radius. This can be productive, and yet: those ten miles.
You can read the whole article by following the link.
Friends Journal Apparently our weddings are now deemed glamorous
March 28, 2023
Glam This line is one of my favorites: “According to the History Channel, an English Dissenter called George Fox established the Religious Society of Friends, or the Quaker Movement, in England in the 1800s.” I’m not sure what’s worse: admitting you’re sourcing your work from the History Channel or getting the date wrong by a couple of centuries (Quakerism is considered to have started in 1652).
But in reality, I’m not sure you need to click through to the article unless you want to see just how bad it’s gotten on some of these SEO-chasing content farms. I’m pretty sure this was largely written by AI. The ZeroGPT detector picked up some sentences; I checked other articles written under the same bylines and ZeroGPT lights up whole paragraphs.
How is blockchain like Quakerism?
March 28, 2023
Filed in the “whaaa?” department: I find this more curious and surprising than enlightening but the author is a bone fide Friend who argues that the evolution of the internet is analogous to a Quaker model of organization.
Forbes Brooklyn Friends support a youth-led outreach music and arts show
March 28, 2023
Supporting younger Friends in an outreach effort, by Kristen Cole:
A few weeks before the show, one of the adult organizers made an announcement about the upcoming show at the rise of meeting for worship. He explained, “We did a really radical thing. We asked our teens what they would want to do if they could organize an event for young people. And they told us. And we listened.” At a time when we are deeply engaged in conversations about the direction of Quakerism, it’s powerful to be reminded that building toward our future might be easier to achieve if we open our hearts and minds and listen to the next generation.
Read more at Finding the Divine in a Mosh Pit. This is from the March edition of Spark, New York Yearly Meeting’s publication, which focuses on the arts this issue.
Be sure to scroll to the bottom of Cole’s article for a disclaimer about the mosh pit (spoiler: there wasn’t one). It made me wonder if kids still mosh. Wikipedia dates the practice to 1980. I’m sure some do, as we live in an age of evergreen sub-genres. The availability of music and video on-demand and the ability to quickly organize communities via app make every era easily accessible. I’ve lost track of how many 80s revivals we’ve gone through.
But concerts these days are so mediated by cell phones. Even I find myself taking it out when the first chords of a favorite song start up. And even if you yourself resist, others will have their phones out videoing you. I’m fascinated by the videos of high school kids from the 1980s that sometime get posted on YouTube. They’re so unfazed by the camera, which would have been some bulky Hi8 camcorder, probably because they figured no one would actually ever look at the footage. It’s hard to imagine the wild abandon and non-self-consciousness of 1980s moshing when you know any awkward move you make might show up on Tiktok or Insta the next day.
Quakers on Wikipedia
March 27, 2023
Steven Davison on how Wikipedia describes Quakers—and how we might respond.
This raises a concern for me about how the Quaker movement might oversee this kind of public presentation of our faith and practice going forward. In the spirit of Wikipedia’s platform as a peer-to-peer project, and in keeping with the non-hierarchical governance structures so important to Friends, and, of course, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I propose a peer-to-peer process for the oversight of such presentations, a long-range project of review that would hopefully include Friends with real expertise in the many areas of Quaker history, faith, and practice covered in this entry and whatever other entries we find
This relates to a long-term concern of mine that so much of the most public information on Friends isn’t created by us. Wikipedia’s relatively benign (there’s actually a bit of a Quaker process connection) but our participation on social media like Facebook and Twitter are mediated by algorithms favoring controversy. I edit Wikipedia entries a couple of times a year but am also a small part of Friends Journal efforts to built out Quaker.org to make it a useful, accurate, and publicly visible introduction to the Religious Society of Friends.
There’s some good discussion on Mastodon by some Wikipedia editors who explain that Davison’s plan would be seen with some suspicion by Wikipedia. As commenter Dan York wrote:
Wikipedia has a very strong ethos around “conflict of interest” with the sense that people too close to a topic can’t write in a neutral point-of-view. There’s definitely value in folks working to improve the pages, but they need to keep these views in mind — and back up everything they do with reliable sources.
Through the Flaming Sword Remembering Feisty
March 23, 2023
Our 2 – 1/2 year old kitty Feisty passed away overnight after we rushed him to an emergency 24-hour animal hospital. He was a good kitty and we’re missing him. He was always playful, athletic, and loyal. He was also quite media-savvy. He liked chilling out Frasier in the evenings, participating in our Zoom calls with Theo off at college, and participating in the kitty cat step blockade with his step-siblings.
Feisty came to us as a litter of four kittens born behind our garage. When the mom seemed to leave them, we took them in and nursed them back to health. There was one who was adorably protective, hissing at us when we came to help and we instantly named him Feisty. Of the four one didn’t make it, two were adopted out, and one — the feisty one — we brought into our home.
Belonging: The Community or the Institution (12/37)
March 21, 2023
Quaker membership has long been a contentious issue for thr past few decades (Why should someone join? What does it mean? What linits should there be?) but it’s becoming more complicated with the rise of hybrid worship. Emily Provance looks at thr state of membership and how it’s evolving.
A lot of the work done about membership lately, especially by young adults, has been about helping Friends in general understand that the institutional practices need to change to reflect what God is doing in our communities.
Turning, Turning