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. 

Grow­ing the Com­mu­ni­ty of Friends – Embrac­ing Diver­si­ty in Quakerism

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). 

New signs!