A new season of QuakerSpeak and it’s the awesome Windy Cooler bringing an important message about abuse in Quaker communities.
I think fundamentally a safer space for survivors and for everyone would be a space in which there is no anxiety about telling the truth about your experience of the world, whatever it is.
And a big shout-out to new QuakerSpeak videographer Christopher Cuthrell stepping into some big shoes. Glad to have him on board.
LizOpp’s reflections from the Friends Association for Higher Education conference.
QuakerQuaker fans, it’s time to start the migration of QuakerQuaker to a new online platform. It started on Ning in almost 15 years ago. That’s forever in internet years!
The first stage will be archiving the conversations currently on QuakerQuaker. There are many year’s worth of great blog posts and invaluable discussion threads. A recent tool built to examine the source material for all the new AI chat bots found that QuakerQuaker is the internet’s second largest online Quaker archive. I want to try to keep that — not for the bots, but for Friends and seekers wanting to learn about Quakerism.
I will need your help. Donations are down this year. And there are new costs if we are to keep this work going: one-time costs for archiving apps and discussion platforms, and new ongoing bills for getting us all connected by email again.
Back when QuakerQuaker started I wrote a bit of a mission statement. I’ll leave it here for you to re-read. If you think this work continues to be important, please help. You can do so here: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=RW96RE86YEFJA
Quakerism is an experiential religion: we believe we should “let our lives speak” and we stay away from creeds and doctrinal statements. The best way to learn what Quakers believe is through listening in on our conversations.
In the last few years, dozens of Quakers have begun sharing stories, frustrations, hopes and dreams for our religious society through blogs. The conversations have been amazing. There’s a palpable sense of renewal and excitement. QuakerQuaker is a daily index to that conversation.
On the tech side of things, I’ve very bummed that the excellent iOS Apollo Reddit app has announce it will be shutting down at the end of the month. The majority of my use of Reddit has been via Apollo in recent years. It’s been heartening to see such a thoroughly well-designed app from an independent developer and I’ve been happy to give a monthly donation.
Reports are that Reddit is preparing for an IPO, which means crappifying everything to make it look more profitable for potential investors. The result is that it will be less useful for many of its users, who are the ones that create all the real value in the first place. You’d think the ongoing Twitter meltdown in value (partly from killing off its third-party apps) would be instructive but apparently not. It’s a lesson Silicon Valley refuses to learn.
I’ve long thought that the Quakers subreddit in particular filled a lot of the function of the original QuakerQuaker: a curated list of interesting, timely online conversations. I’ll still be around. I have my RSS reader letting me know when there’s new posts there and I will often respond to questions via the Reddit website. But a lot of my “hey what’s going on now” browsing has happened on Apollo and will stop.
There’s a 48-hour Reddit boycott happening starting June 12 participating. Judging by the detailed account of correspondence in the Apollo developer’s post, it’s unlikely to change anything, but Reddit leadership will at least see just how pissed many of its users are.
Johan’s book group is reading an old lecture by Jones, The Nature and Functions of the Light in the Thought of George Fox and he reflects on the approach:
Canby exemplifies a typical Quaker approach to theology: it’s often functional. He doesn’t spend time defining “light,” he finds the distinction between “natural light” and the Light of Christ unhelpful; he doesn’t cling to or generate doctrines. Instead, he describes how the Light of Christ actually seems to work in our lives.
Source
I appreciate Johan’s distinction of functional theology here. Every so often my wife will ask me what I think about some specific point of doctrine, say the nature of Christ. As a Catholic, analytical thinker, and religion nerd, this is the kind of thing she naturally ponders, but I rarely give her a very satisfactory response. I often know the “right” answer according to traditional orthodox Christian creeds and I’m always curious what others make of questions like these, but what I myself believe is shaped and largely bounded by my own experiences of Christ working in my life. I’m adding Jones’s article to my reading list.
From Nathan Perrin: “When my Quaker friends heard I was going to Chicagoland to minister at Lombard (Illinois) Mennonite Church, they asked several questions. One question that they asked was whether or not I renounced Quakerism by taking this calling. The brief, less complex answer is: No.”
Locals: I’m really excited about a program Cropwell Meeting is hosting this Sunday: local historian Paul W. Schopp will come and talk about historical Black towns around Marlton, South Jersey, and their involvement in the Underground Railroad.
The Quaker connection is not just the venue of course. The earliest Friends in the Marlton area enslaved Africans, which was the norm among Quakers in the earliest colonial days. From my readings, slavery was on the decline (immigrating Germans were a more desirable workforce) until the disruptions of the French and Indian war threatened to kick the slave trade back into high gear, which in turn inspired a new generation of Quaker abolitionism. This included Joshua Evans, of what later became Marlton/Cropwell, who was a traveling companion of the more well-remembered John Woolman in his antislavery traveling ministry.
By the early nineteenth century, most Quaker towns in South Jersey had freed Black towns nearby, on land typically deeded by Quaker farmers. Friends have a tendency to sometimes over-sell our historical involvement in the Underground Railroad but the real key to the railroad’s success were these freed Black towns. In the area around Cropwell, a town called Milford (now Kresson) served this role. I don’t know anything about it specifically but Schopp has studied it, along with lots of these historical Black towns and I’m very interested to learn more about them.
Follow the link below for some more on Milford, including a TV episode featuring two descendants of the Truitt family and partly filmed at Cropwell Meeting.
From Brian Drayton: “An essential fact to meditate upon is that regardless of what we say, the way we act, the way we are, is “our testimony to the whole world.” In that connection, what are we showing, and what can we show, about what we believe about the foundations of our activities?”
thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com
Mennonite Church USA