Quakers and residential boarding schools

November 25, 2022

A nice Friends Jour­nal opin­ion piece from San­dra Boone Mur­phy on rec­on­cil­ing Quak­ers’ past involve­ment with Native Amer­i­can res­i­den­tial schools. Paula Palmer wrote a detailed arti­cle on this in 2016 (and also talked about it in a 2019 Quak­er­S­peak video). It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to me how Friends try­ing to do good so often did things we look back on as horrific. 

Quakers Today podcast launched

November 16, 2022

So the new pod­cast, Quak­ers Today, offi­cial debuted yes­ter­day, with episode one look­ing at Quak­ers and Fic­tion (no coin­ci­dence that this is also the theme of the Novem­ber 2022 Friends Jour­nal). There’s an excerpt from a read­ing from Anne E.G. Nydam’s sto­ry, “The Con­duits” (you can read it here and hear her entire read­ing here) and excerpts from last year’s Cai Quirk Quak­er­S­peak inter­view. The pod­cast also has a call-in voice­mail line (we snagged 317-QUAKERS) so you’ll hear a cou­ple of peo­ple at the end shar­ing lit­er­a­ture that has shaped them.

The pod­cast comes out every month and you can sub­scribe in your favorite pod­cast ser­vice. We’ll have prompts for Decem­ber’s voice­mail line in a few weeks. A big shoutout to Peter­son Toscano, who is not only the online per­son­al­i­ty of the show but the pod­cast wiz­ard who has put it all togeth­er. Thanks too to Quak­er Vol­un­tary Ser­vice, which has jumped in to spon­sor the first season.

The new pod­cast has a video promo!

Presenting on the peace testimony

November 9, 2022

I wrote up a lit­tle some­thing about this week­end’s pre­sen­ta­tion on the Quak­er peace tes­ti­mo­ny that I gave at Crop­well Meet­ing on Sun­day. I think it turned out well. I have no actu­al pic­tures of the event because I was up front lead­ing it. In con­tent it was not unre­lat­ed to my August Friends Jour­nal col­umn, “Wrestling with the Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny” but it was a whole heck of a lot tamer, as I was aim­ing it at new-to-Quaker atten­ders who don’t know any­thing about the peace tes­ti­mo­ny oth­er than we have one. Ukraine is a hard prob­lem for them, as it is for many of us long-term activists.

One result of my prep was div­ing deep­er into the Eng­lish Civ­il War (per­haps more accu­rate­ly, wars) than I have pre­vi­ous­ly. As an Amer­i­can, I only dim­ly know that there were one but as I kept dig­ging down I real­ized just how essen­tial it was to both the start of Friends and the draft­ing of the famous Dec­la­ra­tion of 1660 to Charles II. We some­times act as if the recip­i­ent was inci­den­tal, as if the king were sim­ply cc’ed on a minute. But it real­ly was craft­ed for the king’s atten­tion and it was a nonag­gres­sion pact of sorts: Quak­ers would­n’t chal­lenge his author­i­ty or the empire if he just left them alone. It’s quite like­ly a state­ment like this was essen­tial for the Quak­er move­ment to sur­vive the roy­al gov­ern­men­t’s back­lash against the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies but it seems just as clear that the state­ment installed guard rails on the purview of Quak­er polit­i­cal action. There were parts of the empire that war­rant­ed a chal­lenge — slav­ery and colo­nial­ism in par­tic­u­lar — and the 1660 Friends side­stepped those questions.

Any­way, I have a slideshow and a prac­tice run so if any­one wants me to repeat the pre­sen­ta­tion for anoth­er Quak­er group I could eas­i­ly do it.

Quak­er Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny Talk

QuakerRanter in the Fediverse

November 9, 2022

And I’ve got­ten the Word­Press Activ­i­ty­Pub plug-in work­ing. If I’ve got my lin­go right, this blog is now a Fedi­verse serv­er avail­able on Mastodon. What does this mean? I’m not quite sure but you can fol­low at: @admin@www.quakerranter.org.

A Mastodon Do-over?

November 8, 2022

I joined Mastodon a few years ago but have only been using it for the last week. What­ev­er one thinks about our nois­i­est bil­lion­aire’s evolv­ing alt-right lean­ings and ganja-fueled impetu­ous­ness, the lever­aged takeover of Twit­ter added a bil­lion dol­lars per year in inter­est pay­ments to its expens­es. I’m skep­ti­cal that any new fea­ture or income source could over­come this new-owner tax.

But using Mastodon has remind­ed me of some of the ear­ly dreams about Twit­ter evolv­ing into a kind of inter­net util­i­ty, acces­si­ble and remixed by var­i­ous oth­er user-facing apps. It start­ed this way: the offi­cial Twit­ter app start­ed as an inde­pen­dent app called Tweet­ie and ear­ly on, any app could access the Twit­ter feed.

As a util­i­ty mod­el, you could post and auto-post all sorts of raw infor­ma­tion to the Twit­ter feed. For exam­ple, loca­tion check-ins on Foursquare or song lis­tens on Last​.fm. This would be too much infor­ma­tion for some­one to scroll through, of course (in all this there would also be apps that would fil­ter out all this fire­hose infor­ma­tion and just dis­play con­ver­sa­tions). But cus­tom apps had all sorts of potentials.

For exam­ple, you could have an app that fol­lows the check-in Tweets. As an open sys­tem, it would pull in from not just Foursquare but any geography-based ser­vice that dumped its info into the Twit­ter fire­hose. Say you’re vis­it­ing an unfa­mil­iar city, you could open the spe­cial­ized app, click a tab for “restau­rants” and get a list of near­by eater­ies that peo­ple on your social graph like.

Or music: anoth­er app could find songs that your friends are lis­ten­ing to. They might have all sorts of tastes but you could cat­a­log gen­res and tell your app to cre­ate a spe­cif­ic mix — say 20% oldies, 50% indie rock, 20% jazz, and 10% con­tem­po­rary hits. Mul­ti­ple apps could be access­ing and mix­ing this data and because of the open­ness of sys­tems — any log­ging sys­tem, an open Twit­ter, any music mix­er — there would be no built-in monop­oly walled gardens.

This is not how Twit­ter evolved. The com­pa­ny want­ed to make mon­ey out of its unlike­ly 140-character sta­tus updates. It bought one of the pop­u­lar Twit­ter clients, added ads to then, then kneecapped the api’s for rival apps so that they did­n’t work as well no mat­ter how clever their design­ers were.

Mastodon is meant to be decen­tral­ized and dis­trib­uted. There are innu­mer­able servers. There’s no obvi­ous way to monop­o­lize things because angry users could just all migrate to anoth­er serv­er. If Mastodon takes off, I’m sure there will be swarms of wannabe young Musks try­ing to fig­ure out how to close it off and siphon off adver­tis­ing dol­lars. But it will be hard. If the ser­vice could get crit­i­cal mass it’s pos­si­ble it could pro­vide a wide ecosys­tem of inter­est­ing services.

And oh yes, I’m at https://​mastodon​.social/​@​m​a​r​t​i​n​k​e​l​ley

Quaker Fiction

November 1, 2022

The Novem­ber issue of Friends Jour­nal is online and in the mail and it’s an excit­ing one: our sec­ond annu­al fic­tion issue. Last year’s issue was more nar­row­ly focused on sci-fi and spec­u­la­tive fic­tion but this one cov­ers all gen­res of fiction.

Some of the arti­cles are his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, two look at Quak­er process and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, and there’s a semi-futuristic bit of satire. We can real­ly be a cre­ative bunch.

Friends Journal podcasting is back!

October 25, 2022

It is the sea­son of the pod­cast in Quak­er­land. In the last few weeks I’ve shared Pen­dle Hill’s new pod­cast and the new one from Irish Friends and hint­ed more were on the way.

One of those is a new pod­cast from Friends Jour­nal called Quak­ers Today. Pro­duced by the most excel­lent Peter­son Toscano, it’s a month­ly pod­cast that will fea­ture a mix of Friends Jour­nal arti­cles and Quak­er­S­peak inter­views — and what­ev­er else we put in there. Peter­son­’s been doing pod­casts since for­ev­er ago (he start­ed back when we would describe our infor­mal blog net­works as “the Quak­er Blo­gos­phere” with no hint of irony) and he brings a great ener­gy to the show. It’s fun watch­ing Friends Jour­nal blos­som in this new medium.

Those with long mem­o­ries will remem­ber that Friends Jour­nal had a pod­cast series that ran for three years start­ing in 2013, con­sist­ing of authors read­ing their sto­ries and the audio to our YouTube author chats. It was fun (I loved the poet­ry read­ings like this one), but it nev­er got many lis­ten­ers and we final­ly end­ed it in 2016 to give more focus to our core work.

It’s nice to be back! I’ve heard the first draft of the first issue and Peter­son­’s done a great job with it. You can lis­ten to the pro­mo below and find it wher­ev­er you get your pod­cast fix.