War and Peace

April 4, 2023

Over on the Crop­well Meet­ing web­site, sto­ries and pic­tures from a talk George Rubin gave this past week­end. George is a dear friend, a mem­ber of Med­ford (N.J.) Meet­ing, and a for­mer Friends Jour­nal trustee. But in the win­ter of 1944 – 45, he was a 19 year old kid from Brook­lyn fly­ing through heavy flak in a B‑17G Fly­ing Fortress over Munich. His expe­ri­ences as a bomber and pris­on­er of war turned him into a com­mit­ted paci­fist: “Human beings are too pre­cious” he told us. I tried to tran­scribe as quick­ly as he spoke, tak­ing pic­tures in the paus­es in between sen­tences. It’s all quite a story.

Ten Miles Round

April 1, 2023

I wrote this mon­th’s Friends Jour­nal intro col­umn, “A Hum­ble Band of Prophets”:

I’ve been think­ing a lot about that phone call [from a mem­ber of a strug­gling meet­ing] and about this month’s lead arti­cle by ​​Andy Stanton-Henry, who urges us to think about what it would mean to focus our atten­tion on a radius of ten miles. This exact mea­sure­ment comes from a rous­ing line from twentieth-century Friend Thomas Kel­ly: “Such bands of hum­ble prophets can recre­ate the Soci­ety of Friends and the Chris­t­ian church and shake the coun­try­side for ten miles around.” Kel­ly in turn got it from seventeenth-century Quak­er founder George Fox, who said that any­one raised up as a mod­ern prophet might “shake all the coun­try in their pro­fes­sion for ten miles round.”

Ten miles seems like such a tri­fling­ly small dis­tance to us today. It’s a few min­utes at high­way speeds. The U.S. Cen­sus Bureau tells us the aver­age work com­mute is 27 miles; the Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion cal­cu­lates that U.S. dri­vers aver­age 36 miles per day.

Per­son­al elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion has made dis­tance even more mean­ing­less, and it’s easy to build and main­tain friend­ships unbound­ed by any geog­ra­phy. There’s a mea cul­pa in this: I’m one of those extreme­ly online peo­ple who spends their days in con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tion with peo­ple well out­side of a ten-mile radius. This can be pro­duc­tive, and yet: those ten miles.

You can read the whole arti­cle by fol­low­ing the link.

Apparently our weddings are now deemed glamorous

March 28, 2023

 

This line is one of my favorites: “Accord­ing to the His­to­ry Chan­nel, an Eng­lish Dis­senter called George Fox estab­lished the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends, or the Quak­er Move­ment, in Eng­land in the 1800s.” I’m not sure what’s worse: admit­ting you’re sourc­ing your work from the His­to­ry Chan­nel or get­ting the date wrong by a cou­ple of cen­turies (Quak­erism is con­sid­ered to have start­ed in 1652).

But in real­i­ty, I’m not sure you need to click through to the arti­cle unless you want to see just how bad it’s got­ten on some of these SEO-chasing con­tent farms. I’m pret­ty sure this was large­ly writ­ten by AI. The ZeroG­PT detec­tor picked up some sen­tences; I checked oth­er arti­cles writ­ten under the same bylines and ZeroG­PT lights up whole paragraphs.

How is blockchain like Quakerism?

March 28, 2023

Filed in the “whaaa?” depart­ment: I find this more curi­ous and sur­pris­ing than enlight­en­ing but the author is a bone fide Friend who argues that the evo­lu­tion of the inter­net is anal­o­gous to a Quak­er mod­el of organization.

Brooklyn Friends support a youth-led outreach music and arts show

March 28, 2023

Sup­port­ing younger Friends in an out­reach effort, by Kris­ten Cole:

A few weeks before the show, one of the adult orga­niz­ers made an announce­ment about the upcom­ing show at the rise of meet­ing for wor­ship. He explained, “We did a real­ly rad­i­cal thing. We asked our teens what they would want to do if they could orga­nize an event for young peo­ple. And they told us. And we lis­tened.” At a time when we are deeply engaged in con­ver­sa­tions about the direc­tion of Quak­erism, it’s pow­er­ful to be remind­ed that build­ing toward our future might be eas­i­er to achieve if we open our hearts and minds and lis­ten to the next generation.

Read more at Find­ing the Divine in a Mosh Pit. This is from the March edi­tion of Spark, New York Year­ly Meet­ing’s pub­li­ca­tion, which focus­es on the arts this issue.

Be sure to scroll to the bot­tom of Cole’s arti­cle for a dis­claimer about the mosh pit (spoil­er: there was­n’t one). It made me won­der if kids still mosh. Wikipedia dates the prac­tice to 1980. I’m sure some do, as we live in an age of ever­green sub-genres. The avail­abil­i­ty of music and video on-demand and the abil­i­ty to quick­ly orga­nize com­mu­ni­ties via app make every era eas­i­ly acces­si­ble. I’ve lost track of how many 80s revivals we’ve gone through.

But con­certs these days are so medi­at­ed by cell phones. Even I find myself tak­ing it out when the first chords of a favorite song start up. And even if you your­self resist, oth­ers will have their phones out video­ing you. I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by the videos of high school kids from the 1980s that some­time get post­ed on YouTube. They’re so unfazed by the cam­era, which would have been some bulky Hi8 cam­corder, prob­a­bly because they fig­ured no one would actu­al­ly ever look at the footage. It’s hard to imag­ine the wild aban­don and non-self-consciousness of 1980s mosh­ing when you know any awk­ward move you make might show up on Tik­tok or Ins­ta the next day.

Quakers on Wikipedia

March 27, 2023

Steven Davi­son on how Wikipedia describes Quak­ers—and how we might respond.

This rais­es a con­cern for me about how the Quak­er move­ment might over­see this kind of pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tion of our faith and prac­tice going for­ward. In the spir­it of Wikipedia’s plat­form as a peer-to-peer project, and in keep­ing with the non-hierarchical gov­er­nance struc­tures so impor­tant to Friends, and, of course, with the guid­ance of the Holy Spir­it, I pro­pose a peer-to-peer process for the over­sight of such pre­sen­ta­tions, a long-range project of review that would hope­ful­ly include Friends with real exper­tise in the many areas of Quak­er his­to­ry, faith, and prac­tice cov­ered in this entry and what­ev­er oth­er entries we find

This relates to a long-term con­cern of mine that so much of the most pub­lic infor­ma­tion on Friends isn’t cre­at­ed by us. Wikipedia’s rel­a­tive­ly benign (there’s actu­al­ly a bit of a Quak­er process con­nec­tion) but our par­tic­i­pa­tion on social media like Face­book and Twit­ter are medi­at­ed by algo­rithms favor­ing con­tro­ver­sy. I edit Wikipedia entries a cou­ple of times a year but am also a small part of Friends Jour­nal efforts to built out Quak​er​.org to make it a use­ful, accu­rate, and pub­licly vis­i­ble intro­duc­tion to the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends.

There’s some good dis­cus­sion on Mastodon by some Wikipedia edi­tors who explain that Davi­son’s plan would be seen with some sus­pi­cion by Wikipedia. As com­menter Dan York wrote:

Wikipedia has a very strong ethos around “con­flict of inter­est” with the sense that peo­ple too close to a top­ic can’t write in a neu­tral point-of-view. There’s def­i­nite­ly val­ue in folks work­ing to improve the pages, but they need to keep these views in mind — and back up every­thing they do with reli­able sources.

Remembering Feisty

March 23, 2023
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Our 2 – 1/2 year old kit­ty Feisty passed away overnight after we rushed him to an emer­gency 24-hour ani­mal hos­pi­tal. He was a good kit­ty and we’re miss­ing him. He was always play­ful, ath­let­ic, and loy­al. He was also quite media-savvy. He liked chill­ing out Frasi­er in the evenings, par­tic­i­pat­ing in our Zoom calls with Theo off at col­lege, and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the kit­ty cat step block­ade with his step-siblings. 

Feisty came to us as a lit­ter of four kit­tens born behind our garage. When the mom seemed to leave them, we took them in and nursed them back to health. There was one who was adorably pro­tec­tive, hiss­ing at us when we came to help and we instant­ly named him Feisty. Of the four one did­n’t make it, two were adopt­ed out, and one — the feisty one — we brought into our home.

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Belonging: The Community or the Institution (12/37)

March 21, 2023

Quak­er mem­ber­ship has long been a con­tentious issue for thr past few decades (Why should some­one join? What does it mean? What lin­its should there be?) but it’s becom­ing more com­pli­cat­ed with the rise of hybrid wor­ship. Emi­ly Provance looks at thr state of mem­ber­ship and how it’s evolving.

A lot of the work done about mem­ber­ship late­ly, espe­cial­ly by young adults, has been about help­ing Friends in gen­er­al under­stand that the insti­tu­tion­al prac­tices need to change to reflect what God is doing in our communities.