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.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
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!
Quaker Q&A available from Emily Provance
November 14, 2022
I mentioned Emily Provance’s blog series, “answers for a small‑f friend,” a few weeks ago but now she’s gone and organized them into a easy-to-read series. Check it out at her Quaker Q&A.
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.
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/@martinkelley
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.