Quakers have been asking some very hard questions about their testimony to peace and their forms of pacifism following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. They are hard because there are no simple right answers.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Oooh!, a Quaker zine
March 6, 2023
Wess Daniels got a pack of Quaker zines in the mail. That’s right, physical paper:
A few weeks back, I got some mail from someone I didn’t know. As I opened it, these cute little booklets fell out, and a letter addressed to me: Hello, Mr. Daniels. The letter writer, Pacific Northwest Quaker Natalie Ramsland, told me a little about how she came into zine making and why she was sending me some of her zines.
That’s very cool! I zined back in college: “The Vacuum” ran every Friday for most of two years. When I was doing a nonviolence website in the mid-90s it seemed natural to apply this model and I accidentally started blogging, complete with mirroring it to an email list (I wrote “Fifteen Years of Blogging” eleven years ago, whoa!). Now my blog automatically goes out by email on Fridays. There’s such an obvious through-line between the 90s zine and my ongoing blogging (and obviously we have weekly content cycles for Friends Journal too).
I love the idea of paper zines coming back though their limit has always been that the best distribution is local and misses those of us out of the geographic loop.
Zine-makerNatalie also has a Substack, which I’ll be reading eagerly.
What would you like to see in Friends Journal?
February 22, 2023
Every eighteen months or so Friends Journal start brainstorming new themes and boil them down into a list. We’re now plotting out themes for the spring of 2024 and beyond. Part of this process is asking readers what they’d like to see us cover and if you follow FJ on Facebook, Twitter, or Mastodon, you’ve probably seen us asking there. But I would also like to hear from Quaker Ranter readers:
What topics would YOU like to see Friends Journal addressing in the future?
We’ve been running themed issues for over a decade now. Check out the list of themes since 2012 or look through the archives to reminiscence about past issues. There’s a good chance we’ve already covered the subject you’re interested in, but it might be a good time for us to take a new look or a fresh spin. Leave a comment here or email me at martin@friendsjournal.org with any ideas you have.
25th anniversary of my NYTimes profile
February 21, 2023
It makes me feel old to admit to a quarter-century anniversary for something that happened in my early thirties but 25 years ago today, New York Times published a profile of my work on Nonviolence.org. Thanks to a great archive section, you can still read it on their website.
While many orgs have public relations departments dedicated to planting stories, this one happened pretty organically. I followed Lisa Napoli’s work in what the Times then called its “Cybertimes” section (a precursor to the less cringey “Tech” section of today) and liked her articles. It was seven years after the first Gulf War and President Clinton was saber rattling in Iraq again. I wondered how the peace movement would organize differently now that the internet was becoming a real organizing tool and I suspected Napoli might be interested. I shot an email and she responded immediately and set up an interview. A photographer came to my house and took a lot of pictures (including a really cringey one of me playing a guitar that graced the Cybertimes front page but has not been archived, thank goodness.)
It’s especially funny to me to see how dated some of the language and references are.
Circling around, and surprising nudges toward renewed ministry and plainness
February 19, 2023
From LizOpp, back on the blog:
I have come to believe that I live my life not in a straight line from birth to death but in a series of small and large circles: from birth to learning; from growth to forgetting; from remembering to prideful living; from brokenness to humility; from deep love and connection to separateness; from despair to faithfulness.
I too have felt circles coming back around. Liz attended last weekend’s workshop, the first multi-day retreat I’ve led since… check notes… 2014, when R. Scot Miller got me to Kalamazoo, Michigan, for Green Pastures Quarterly Meeting. Last year I finally stopped my meeting wandering and have settled down at Cropwell Meeting, where I get to be involved in all the silly, lightweight dramas that occur whenever a group of people come together.
There, I’ve felt my spoken ministry return. I was shocked a few months ago when I stood and was given words that started with reflecting of the sounds of the leaves blowing against the outside walls, referenced an attender who had just been sweeping them, circled to the history of the people who have gathered within those walls and maintained the building for worship, moved sideways into a gentle lesson on ministry in the quietist tradition, pulled it back to Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, and then tied it up in a bow with prayers of thanks to our faithful ancestors and to those today who continue to sweep away the ever-returned leaves. Readers, let me assure you I don’t think I’ve ever given such coherent, balanced ministry and I’m not sure where it came from. But faithfulness is key.
I’ve also felt the nudge to bring back some identifiable plain dress. For years I’ve tended toward what I used to call “Sears plain“1 and during the work-from-home life I’m sometimes lucky if I get through the day without still wearing my pajamas. Over the last few weeks I’ve been adding suspenders to my regular clothes. Of course I’ve gone through all the old familiar self-questioning: Am I doing this to stand out? Am I trying to puff myself up? Is this what faithfulness leads me? But these questions are part of the process and a tug toward plainness often precedes outward ministry; in his study Quaker Journals, Howard Brinton noted that future ministers often recorded inward nudges in their teen years and became plainer in dress to the ridicule of their peers. I’m not a teen and I doubt anyone is going to make fun of me (at least to my face) but I do feel a certain seriousness of intent come over me when I overcome my natural desire for social anonymity and put the suspenders on.
Truth and integrity retreat
February 14, 2023
My weekend online retreat went well, I think, at least many of the 15 participants said they appreciated it. It’s the first multi-day event I’ve led in awhile and as I wrote here earlier, I felt strongly led to plan a flexible, Spirit-led event. It was a bit terrifying to be working so from-the-seat-of-my-pants, but it was a great group of people, who could maintain the pacing on their own. There was a lot of very deep sharing (I set confidentiality as a value early on) and we let people share for longer or share something different than asked if they felt it important. There were a few moments when it felt like a long statement might be bringing in too much centrifugal force but it pulled back and we were the richer for it. The hardest time for me was around 4pm Saturday but that’s such a hard time to be alert.
The two-day, three-part retreat was part of Windy Cooler’s “Testimonies to Mercy” series, co-sponsored by New York’s Powell House and Ben Lomond Center. Some random phrases and ideas:
- Integrity=Love, Integrity=Faithfulness, Integrity=Presence.
- Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy: the much-quoted adage, attributed to Warren W. Wiersbe on sketchy quote websites.
- Disciples are followers who aren’t motivated by punishment.
- The image that truth can chase us.
One of the more surprising moments was when I brought in Hugh Barbour’s Five Tests for Discernment. Participants had been talking about the meaning of Truth — Is there only one? Are there many? How do we know to continue when others disagree? — and I thought Barbour’s list would be an easy one to lean on. He developed it in the early sixties as findings for research for his 1964 book, The Quakers in Puritan England and I remembered it as a revelation when I first came across it probably twenty years ago. But the insistence on “moral purity” and “inward unity” didn’t sit well with a group with members that have sometimes had to buck Quaker cultural mores and institutional inertia to follow a leading. We started brainstorming different tests we’ve developed more experientially. I’d love to tease these ideas out more someday.
Podcast: How has your view of Jesus God or religion changed since you were young?
February 14, 2023
The fourth episode of the Quakers Today podcast has just come out. Looking at “Faith Transformation,” it features interviews with Hayden Hobby (“Surviving Religious Trauma” in Friends Journal) and Calliope George (“My Experience as a Young Adult Quaker,” QuakerSpeak).
Weekend online retreat on Integrity, now with scholarships
February 8, 2023
I’ve been told there’s now scholarship money available for this weekend’s online retreat — and even a buy-one-get-one sale (I’ve never been BOGO’ed before!). It starts at 7pm Friday night — come join us.
From the expanded description:
Have you felt anxious about something you think might be true, wondered about sharing this — and how you might share the truth with wisdom — and even if you can believe the hard truth yourself? Join the senior editor of Friends Journal, Martin Kelley, in a three part online retreat on facing the truth when the truth is hard to face. It is about finding integrity.
Times are 7 – 8pm Eastern Friday the 10th (how does the truth prosper with thee?) and 12 – 2 (the truth within us) and again at 3 – 5pm Eastern on Saturday the 11th (speaking truth in the world). Register here: https://www.powellhouse.org/testimonies-to-mercy
This virtual retreat on truth is part of the Testimonies to Mercy series sponsored by Powell House and Ben Lomond Quaker centers and convened by public minister Windy Cooler. This retreat is normally $125 to attend because we are compensating for labor but we have some money for scholarships now and we are also offering Buy One Get One: if you register you can choose a friend to bring with you for free. If you have questions or need some help with a scholarship please get in touch with Windy here or at WindyCooler at gmail.
https://www.powellhouse.org/testimonies-to-mercy