On Friends Jour­nal, an account from Bruce Bir­chard of Cen­tral Philadel­phia Meet­ing’s response to a sense that wor­ship had got­ten too chat­ty. They want­ed to effect a “spir­i­tu­al ground­ing of Friends wor­ship” and so for­mal­ly record­ed eight min­is­ters and asked them to pre­pare ser­mons for semi-programmed wor­ship ses­sions. Oh wait, this is Cen­tral Philly, HQ of Lib­er­al U.S. Quak­er insti­tu­tion­al­ism, so they could­n’t call them min­is­ters or ser­mons, and while they repeat­ed­ly call it a pro­gram they go out of their way to insist this isn’t any kind of pro­gram­ming. You can read their eight pre­pared ser­mons… *checks notes* eight pre­pared mes­sages here. They’re good, and well worth reading.

Also on FJ, Greg Woods and Jen New­man fin­ish off Sep­tem­ber fea­tures’s with an arti­cle about their work on voca­tion­al dis­cern­ment for young adult Friends.

Work­ing on some arti­cles on Quak­er tes­ti­monies and re-reading Antho­ny Manousos’s 2009 blog post, “How Howard Brin­ton Invent­ed SPICE, the Quak­er Tes­ti­monies,” and Paul Buck­ley’s 2012 talk, “The Ori­gin of the SPICES.” Both gems.

Sad to read of the pass­ing of Mariellen Gilpin in What Canst Thou Say? She was a con­sis­tent­ly thought­ful writer on Quak­er mys­ti­cism, min­istry, and elder­ship for many decades.

A new Quak­er­S­peak this week: Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty on the Road: Five Years of Quak­er RV Liv­ing, an inter­view with Bet­sey Kenworthy.