Presenting on the peace testimony

November 9, 2022
· Martin Kelley

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
· Martin Kelley

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
· Martin Kelley

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
· Martin Kelley

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.


Fiction

Fiction 

Novem­ber 2022

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Friends Journal podcasting is back!

October 25, 2022
· Martin Kelley

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.

Resources for differently abled Friends

October 25, 2022
· Martin Kelley

In the Octo­ber issue, fre­quent Friends Jour­nal con­trib­u­tor Carl Blu­men­thal inter­views Nic­hole Net­tle­ton, of New York Year­ly Meet­ing’s Dif­fer­ent Abled Friends and Allies (DAFA). Prob­a­bly my favorite part is when Nic­hole tells the sto­ry of look­ing for sup­port and con­tact­ing DAFA only to real­ize is was­n’t active any­more. Unde­terred, she took mat­ters into her own hands:

Since I saw it as a major need and I had a lot of expe­ri­ence with dis­abil­i­ties, I thought I could help by set­ting up week­ly Zoom meet­ings.… We start­ed about a year ago, and though I don’t know much about facil­i­tat­ing or the tech­nol­o­gy involved, I’m learn­ing as I go. Some­times you just have to start things when the need is there. You can’t be afraid that you don’t know enough or think you’re good enough to lead.

Carl has been work­ing on issues of phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties and men­tal health for decades and he’s been a friend­ly advo­cate to get us to pub­lish more on the sub­ject. Last year he wrote the land­mark Quak­ers and Men­tal Health­care for us. I cer­tain­ly learned a lot about Quak­er involve­ment in the field. This after­noon I inter­viewed Carl for our author chat YouTube series.

Nearly all Friends

October 21, 2022
· Martin Kelley

Speak­ing of FAQs that I hope will attract search engine queries for quite some time, Emi­ly Provance has been on fire with a series she calls “answers for a small‑f friend,” in which she — well, answers a lot of ques­tions peo­ple might have. Many of these are just as use­ful for us large‑F Friends and they’re all worth check­ing out.

This week’s is “Is there any­thing all Quak­ers have in com­mon?” She gets around the sometimes-confoundingly diverse set of opin­ions among Friends by find­ing com­mon­al­i­ties that “near­ly all Friends” would agree with. It’s a good way to proceed.

QuakerSpeak on memorial services

October 21, 2022
· Martin Kelley

The most antic­i­pat­ed new release this Fri­day 1 is a new video from Quak­er­S­peak: What to Expect at a Quak­er Memo­r­i­al Ser­vice.

These ensem­ble Quak­er­S­peaks are like FAQs sent out to the search engines. They’re edu­ca­tion­al to watch when they come out: I sit there imag­in­ing what I would be say­ing if the cam­era was on me. But the real ben­e­fit is months and years from now when non-Quaker who has nev­er walked into a meet­ing­house is faced with hav­ing to attend a memo­r­i­al ser­vice for a beloved neigh­bor, or rel­a­tive, or co-worker. They will nat­u­ral­ly turn to their favorite search engine and find this video on YouTube. Six and half min­utes lat­er they’ll know what they’re get­ting into. Maybe they’ll stick around and click on relat­ed videos like “What to Expect in Quak­er Meet­ing for Wor­ship.”

I’m biased, cer­tain­ly, but I think Friends do wed­dings and funer­als par­tic­u­lar­ly well. Many peo­ple first expe­ri­ence Friends through these ser­vice. I know I always leave know­ing so much more about some­one who I assumed I already knew;; I some­times feel a pang of regret at not hav­ing tak­en the time to dis­cov­er their oth­er inter­ests while they were alive.

What to Expect at a Quak­er Memo­r­i­al Service