The FUM email newslet­ter ref­er­enced else­where also has nice pho­tos from memo­r­i­al ser­vices for Eden Grace, a New Eng­land Friend who seemed to effort­less­ly walk between dif­fer­ent fla­vors of Friends, find­ing com­mon­al­i­ty and build­ing con­nec­tions wher­ev­er she went. She is very missed.

In the Philadel­phia Inquir­er, an arti­cle on slave own­ing by Philadel­phia Quak­ers, with sources includ­ing Friends Jour­nal. There’s lot of great links through­out, I’m still mak­ing my way through them. 

On Quak­er­S­peak, a video inter­view of Nic­hole Net­tle­ton, who is a coor­di­na­tor for a sup­port group called Dif­fer­ent­ly Abled Friends and Allies. (I know some folks real­ly don’t like “dif­fer­ent­ly abled” but it’s the name of the group and it’s how Nicole self-identifies in the video.)

And a fas­ci­nat­ing non-Quaker rabbit-hole: a delight­ful­ly obses­sive search for the pur­pose of a seem­ing­ly pur­pose­less pedes­tri­an bridge in Min­neso­ta.

I recent­ly read an opin­ion­at­ed bit of advice that has stuck with me: it was that con­tent cre­ators should focus their atten­tion on only two social net­works. It’s felt wise, espe­cial­ly in this odd moment in which Twit­ter has implod­ed and we have a pro­lif­er­a­tion of ser­vices hop­ing to suc­ceed it in it’s role as “town square.” Ten years ago if I had some­thing to share I would post it to both Twit­ter and Face­book. Now there’s just too many con­tenders; I’d spend half an hour post­ing any link.

So what would my two be? This Quak­er­Ran­ter newsletter/blog should be one. It’s a place to share ideas unfil­tered by Sil­i­con Val­ley algo­rithms.  But the sec­ond? Is Face­book still the place where enough peo­ple con­gre­gate to make it essen­tial despite its many draw­backs? Red­dit is still inter­est­ing despite some recent con­tro­ver­sial moves by its owners. 

A third place might be Quak­erQuak­er. Update: I’ve moved the domain name to a new serv­er, which means there’s actu­al­ly a “site under con­struc­tion” notice. The archives will be next. 

This is a nice bit of ecu­meni­cal fel­low­ship: the first syn­a­gogue in York, Eng­land, since a pogrom 800 years ago meets at the Friends meet­ing­house. (Also as some­one who lives in the North­east U.S., it seems incred­i­ble a city the size of York wouldn’t have mul­ti­ple syn­a­gogues and that events 800 years ago still shape the city’s reli­gious life.)

Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing has post­ed a use­ful list of reli­gious edu­ca­tion resources for meet­ings plan­ning their fall programs. 

I’m usu­al­ly aller­gic to any­thing that tries to tidy up Quak­er faith and prac­tice into the SPICES mnemon­ic but I real­ly like my friend Gene Hill­man’s look at their ori­gins in bib­li­cal and ear­ly Quak­er faith.

From Kathy Hersh, Quak­ers in DeLand, Flori­da, gave away 500 books as a response to the culling of Black-history books from local libraries. 

Is the AI hype cycle start­ing to come down? Cer­tain­ly it’s a bit pre­ma­ture to write any­thing off, but these aren’t good num­bers for AI fanboys.

Friends Jour­nal is start­ing to look for arti­cles for our Jan­u­ary issue on For­give­ness.

Rashid Darden’s new Quak­er­S­peak inter­views is real­ly great. He says a lot of things I’ve been say­ing over the years but with more elo­quence and concision. 

The Quak­er faith is not a coun­try club. It’s not a lega­cy soci­ety. The most impor­tant Quak­er is the friend who is yet to be con­vinced. My per­son­al min­istry is one that is so con­vinced that Quak­erism is one of the best pos­si­ble paths to take that it would be wrong for me to keep qui­et about it. 

I remem­ber the first time I real­ized my out­reach work had to be more con­cerned about poten­tial Quak­ers than actu­al ones. It changes the cal­cu­lus on a lot of deci­sions and can be a bit dan­ger­ous if the cur­rent ones don’t think any­thing needs to change. 

Update on the migra­tion: The site is on the move. I’ve closed the Ning account which has host­ed it for some­thing like 15 years and the domain is chang­ing reg­is­trars. I have an archive of the old site, which should be avail­able soon (my goal is that old links will auto­mat­i­cal­ly bring peo­ple to the archived page). 

A bit of excite­ment at my meet­ing, Crop­well in Marl­ton, N.J.: we’ve got new signs! Not the most excit­ing news for out­siders but it’s good to have them. I’m espe­cial­ly glad that we final­ly have them in the less-used south­ern entrance to the dri­ve­way, as it’s where car map­ping sys­tems send vis­i­tors who type in our for­mal address. It’s nev­er been well marked and feels like the pri­vate dri­ve­way of the adjoin­ing house (our old school building).