The family went to a new South Jersey Pine Barren’s spot outside of Newfield. The Unexpected Refuge is really wet and really wild — be prepared for soaked boots and some creative bushwacking even on the blazed trails. South Jersey Trails has profiled it already, of course, so you can get more details there (notably, you have to schedule your first visit so as to get an orientation). There’s also a Facebook page.
John Woolman visited my meeting this weekend and let me tell you, he looked good for a 300-year-old. Actually, of course, it was a re-enactor: Charles Bruder, of the John Woolman Memorial. I tried writing down a bit of his ministry as Woolman (taken from Woolman’s Journal).
I watched a great Zoom talk this week, hosted by Haverford College and featuring Ben Pink Dandelion and Robynne Rogers Healey. The topic was “The New History of Quakerism” and its focus was on the shifts happening in Quaker academic histories since the 1990s. Dandelion did a fantastic job putting the last 150 years of Quaker historiography in context and laying out the positives of more recent developments: more academic rigor, a wider diversity of voices, changing foci of topics, and strong interest by academic publishers.
Healey identified three major fields in which the new histories are challenging what are often comforting apologetics of previous Quaker studies: the equality of women, slavery and indigenous relations, and pacifism. All these are much more complicated than the stories we tell. She then listed three trends: decentering London and Philadelphia, reevaluating the so-called quietist period, and including academics and histories of the Global South.
Dandelion said these changes were “all for the better,” and while I agree wholeheartedly with him in regards to content, there’s one way in which the new publishing opportunities are failing us: to be blunt, price.
Take the Penn State University Press series, “The New History of Quakerism,” that both panelists have written for. The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830 – 1937 edited by Stephen W. Angell, Dandelion, and David Harrington Watt is $125. Quakerism in the Atlantic World, 1690 – 1830 edited by Healey is $90. Quaker Women, 1800 – 1920, edited by Healey and Carole Dale Spencer is $125.
Both Healey and Dandelion acknowledged the problem of inaccessible prices in their talk. Dandelion suggested that meeting libraries might be able to purchase these books but I think that’s more hopeful than realistic. My small meeting certainly couldn’t. I went to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Library and they wouldn’t let me check out The Quaker World (FJ review), the 2022 collection edited by my friends C. Wess Daniels and Rhiannon Grant. It’s got a lot of great authors and I heartily recommend it, but only in absentia because at $250 I’m never going to read it.
As an amateur Quaker history lover, these are all volumes I would love to read, but I’m not writing this because of my own personal anguish (real as it is!) but because the prices are breaking what has been an essential transmission system for new histories. In the late 1980s, Thomas Hamm published The Transformation of American Quakerism, 1800 – 1907 with Indiana University Press. It was $25 and I splurged. It became an important source in my understanding of Quaker divisions and nineteenth-century quietism. Still, decades later, when I write blog posts, or teach Quakerism 101, or answer an online question, I’m often regurgitating perspectives I learned from Hamm.
Go to Facebook, go to Reddit, and people aren’t sharing these groundbreaking histories. Just now, randomly opening Facebook, there’s a post by someone asking about James Nayler, with someone answering it by referencing Hugh Barbour’s mid-1960s history. I love Barbour but he had his own filters and we’ve learned a lot since then.
Every meeting I’ve been a part of had a small number of history nerds in residence who led the Quakerism 101 classes or hosted book groups or Bible study, and they brought their nerdiness to their meeting tasks. To use Healey’s list, many Quakers in the benches still think of Friends’ race relations in terms of abolitionism, still consider early Friends as unalloyed feminists, and rarely give a thought to Friends in the Global South. I recently read a new article about a local meeting that was founded by one of the largest slaveholding families in the area and the only mention of slavery was its much-later anti-slavery society; I really want these kinds of stories to be too embarrassing to publish. Quakers in the benches need the perspectives of these new historians to understand ourselves.
Are there ways that academics can repurpose their inaccessible work so that it can trickle down to a general audience? I’m glad this Zoom talk was open to the public and well publicized: at least some of us could watch it and know the outlines of the changing historiography. But how else can we work to bridge the gap? Blog posts, articles in general publications, podcasts, Pendle Hill pamphlets? What are we doing and what more could we do? I’m in Quaker publishing, obviously, and so part of the problem if there’s a breakdown in transmission. We review the books and QuakerSpeak often dives into history. My friend Jon Watts’s Thee Quaker podcast has some wonderfully nerdy episodes. But all these feel like snippets: ten minutes here, 2000 words there. When I go to learn more, I’m stuck by the limitations of the open internet, caught in JSTOR articles I can’t access, or histories only available in print for $100-plus.
I’m not blaming anyone here. I understand we’re all caught in these capitalist and academic systems. I just wonder what we can do.
Also, special shoutout to Rhiannon Grant, who is the only Quaker academic I know of who is seemingly everywhere: Blog, articles in FJ, installments in the “Quaker Quicks” series, podcast segments on the BBC and Thee Quaker (she even guested on one of my FJ author chats!). Plus she’s on Mastodon, Bluesky, and TikTok and has her own welcome-to-Quakers page. I don’t think this ubiquitous approach is at all replicable for other academics. Even I’m not a proponent of social media ubiquity, preferring to focus on a few platforms.
A great article by Marcelle Martin in this month’s Friends Journal: Quaker Dreams. I love the story of Margaret Fell being prepared for the wild entrance of George Fox by way of a dream. And Robert Pyle’s image-rich dream that led him to abolitionism is truly amazing. I also appreciate Martin’s exploration of more recent Quaker dream work. I interviewed her this week in an FJ Author Chat:
Here’s a sobering factoid: one of the more Googled search terms bringing people to Friends Journal is “Why I left the Quakers.”
They find two things. The first match is a 22-year-old article from Jack Powelson, “Why I am Leaving Quakers.” He notes the political diversity of the Quakers he joined in the 1940s and bemoans that “over the years, unprogrammed Quakers have narrowed their views”:
Back in 1943, as many Republicans sat in the benches as Democrats, and meeting was a place for the spiritual enrichment of persons of all political beliefs; even soldiers in uniform came to meeting. If the spirit of the 1940s existed now, right-to-lifers might today sit next to pro-choicers, each being equally blessed in the eyes of God. With the spiritual under-girding of the meeting, different political beliefs would be advocated in secular organizations.
I think it worthwhile to note that when Jack wrote his own obituary(!), he still identified as a Friend. This is not atypical. I can quickly think of a half-dozen people who have publicly left Quakers but are still active in Quaker social media spaces. I’m really grateful for that, as many of them are personal friends, mentors, and inspirations and I appreciate their perspective on the Quaker dramas of the day. Quaker spiritual principles aren’t really that unique and it’s quite possible to follow them outside of Quaker religious bodies and these nominally ex-Quakers show how this can be done.
The second FJ article that those searching for “why I left Quakers” turn up is Betsy Blake’s 2013 “Quakerism Left Me.” I’m a big Betsy Blake fan and worked on her as editor on this article. I know it was brave to write and that she got some serious pushback after publication. She too was talking of polarization:
We knew we would be affected by a divisiveness that we did not experience and found contrary to the forgiveness and peacemaking that we were being taught. Though younger, we did sympathize. We too had dealt with conflicts, fights, bullying, and popularity contests. We knew enough to know that there was passion and genuine care among the adults, mixed in with something that was telling them to cut off their brothers and sisters in Christ.
Betsy of course wasn’t declaring that she herself was leaving. The polarizations she spoke of soon led to schisms in both the Indiana yearly meeting of her youth and the North Carolina (FUM) of her teen years. I don’t know Betsy’s formal membership status nowadays but she’s active on Quaker social media. (Professionally, she designs websites nowadays and offers a template for Quaker meetings that looks great. I would totally recommend her if you’re looking to revamp your site!)
Another data point in all this might be George Amoss Jr.’s recent blog post, “Leaving Liberal Quakerism: What Love Would Have Me Do.”
George talks about by the “exacerbated” “self-righteousness” he’s encountered:
The proximate cause of that alienation is the adoption among Liberal Friends of sociopolitical ideologies that I find reductive, dishonest, divisive, and destructive, leading even to the defense of violent crime. But that, at least in its current extreme form, is a recent development, facilitated by the fundamental unsoundness of contemporary beliefs.
Friends are a big, messy group of people with all sorts of opinions. While we can agree on broad principles (racism bad, peace good), it’s rare to develop a real sense of unity on either analysis or strategy. We should of course thresh out issues; interest sub-groups of like-minded individuals can build momentum and do a lot of good within both our religious society and in the greater world. If we can tolerate this messy diversity in our meetings, then our shared community can be great incubators for something more radical than itself. With time and spiritual discernment the radical position can become mainstream among Friends.
I do see some Friends nowadays trying to press for more ideological conformity than actually exists. The ever-interesting and challenging Adria Gulizia has a long comment on George’s Amos post about trying to reconcile Quaker beliefs with an antiracism statement being considered by New York Yearly Meeting. She concludes: “But what some of us have learned is that, while the stakes could not be higher, it is not in victory but in the struggle itself that we find our blessing, that in facing our reckoning with faith and courage, we may be strengthened and deepened and transformed, not just as individuals but as a people of faith.”
I hope we can continue to respect the diversity and messiness of Liberal Friends.
As I see it, the purpose of Quaker community is the spiritual and community part of our work. Our specific political languages and analyses will evolve and change every decade or so; what I hope will remain constant is our desire for truth, our reliance on the Holy Spirit for guidance, and our genuine love of neighbors in all their contradictions and messiness. In 2006 Paul Buckley wrote The Temptation to Do Something: A Quietist Perspective, that I think speaks to some of this.
I do hope George Amoss finds a way to stay engaged with Friends.
A big thank-you to all the Quaker Ranter fans who donated last week to get the websites back up. Two nonprofit jobs and four kids mean web bills are not always near the top of the family’s must-pay juggle of expenses. The websites should be good for another few months. If anyone missed on on the fund appeal, you can always click on the support link to help keep the lights on.
Wanna work with me? Friends Journal is looking for a part-time, paid intern to work on Quakers Today podcast. You’ll get to work most directly with its most excellent host, Peterson Toscano. Learn more at Friendsjournal.org/job.
It was wild for me to read this story about housing, race, and money in West Philadelphia and realize it wasn’t just an article about my old block but my actual apartment. I lived upstairs in 1250 South 45th and Margaret Strothers was my landlady. It was easily my favorite apartment ever and it’s a shame to see that most of the row has been leveled for shitty student housing.