I wrote up a presentation that Sarah Clarke and Bo Méndez gave about their work with the Quaker United Nations Office.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Cropwell Quakers New England Quaker general secretary Noah Merrill spoke to CBS News about the DHS lawsuit
February 5, 2025
New Tom Gates blog: Quakers and the End of Scapegoating
January 29, 2025
Philadelphia-area Friend Tom Gates has started a blog. Tom’s a very grounded and thoughtful Friend and I’m glad to know we’ll be seeing more of his writings. From his intro:
Contemporary liberal Friends (Quakers), in common with other liberal denominations, have largely drifted away from the Bible, due in part to its seeming sanction of divine violence. Girard, by contrast, sees the overcoming of “sacred violence” as the central theme of the Biblical witness, and so can provide the means by which Quakers (and others) might reengage with the Scriptures. Girard’s claim that the biblical God has “nothing to do with violence” will resonate with Friends traditional commitment to nonviolence and peacemaking. His insights into “the scapegoat mechanism” can also help us to understand the witness of early Friends, who functioned as “the scapegoat caste” in 17th century England.
Growing Meetings
January 28, 2025
Craig Barnett on UK meetings that are attracting newcomers:
Newcomers need to be made welcome, including children. They need to find people who enjoy spending time together, who are open about their spiritual experience, and willing to share the riches of the Quaker way with them. They need to experience Quaker worship that is expectant and gathered, where people take the risk of openness to the Spirit that leads to deep and vulnerable spoken ministry.
Quakers sue over immigration enforcement
January 28, 2025
Obviously the biggest Quaker news this week is a number of Quaker bodies (including my own Philadelphia Yearly Meeting) suing the Department of Homeland Security over policy changes that allow immigration agents to go into house of worship. The suit is being widely reported in mainstream media (NBC News, Axios, The New Republic, Reuters, Breitbart, NYPost, Channel 6 Philadelphia, Philadelphia Inquirer).
How do we use money?
January 2, 2025
The newest Friends Journal issue is out, looking at how we use money. It’s perhaps not the sexiest topic but it speaks to what we value as a body of believers. Are we focused on our internal group or on the world outside our walls? Sometimes the discussions around money are tedious and our decisions self-evident. I think it’s possible for a meeting to spend too much time focused on its own self-management. But there are times when discussions of resource use brings out surprising inspiration.
First up in our features is Joann Neuroth’s “Putting Our Money Where Our Hearts Are,” a look at how her meeting in Lansing, Michigan, took seemingly tiny steps that have grown into signifiant community outreach and investment.
When we catch our breath to add it all up, we realize that the volunteers who “feed the pantry” daily have put $11,000 of food in that box each year. It feels a bit like loaves and fishes! Where did it come from, one grocery bag at a time? We are pretty sure anyone proposing an $11,000 program back in 2020 would have been quickly set straight about limits to our capacity. But one can of soup at a time, we have truly surprised ourselves.
The Quaker Twitter eXodus
December 18, 2024
New Friends Journal article on some of the Quaker groups leaving Twitter/X this week, following Friends World Committee’s Monday announcement.
There’s been a little pushback, on X and Reddit, along the lines that Quakers should be represented everywhere. Our article quotes Alistair McIntosh, who posted on X:
I prefer it when Quakers bring an alternative presence to conflict zones. Has God not already got sufficient angels in heaven? Can we not, as our 1947 Nobel Peace Prize citation quotes it, act “to build up in a spirit of love what has been destroyed in a spirit of hatred.”
I get it but I don’t think the metaphor holds. No one is trapped on a social network.
One problem with this line of reasoning is that it fails to take into account the time and resources that it takes to be on a social platform. Facebook, X, Threads, Bluesky, Discord, Tiktok, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit, Mastodon… There are so many social networks and you can’t be everywhere. As a publisher, you have to choose where you place your attention. X has shot itself in the foot time and time again since Musk came in. He has no idea how to run a social network.
The quality of discourse at X had turned to shit. Much of the audience is gone. Posts with links are downgraded in the algorithm, giving publishers little incentive to stay. For most publishers, the main purpose of social networks is to get people to their websites (hopefully to sign up for email lists). X is following the lead of Meta (Facebook, Threads, Instagram), whose networks have become increasingly useless as they’ve downgraded posts with links.
Many pubs are reporting they’re now getting more referral visitors from Bluesky than X, even with fewer followers. For me, this announcement is less about politics than it is a recognition that X isn’t Twitter and that the enshittification of the network is such that it’s no longer worth our limited resources or attention.
When Friends World Committee’s World Office came to us and said that a bunch of Quaker orgs were organizing to leave X en masse, I responded with a shrug. It hasn’t felt worth it to stay on X. This is as good a time as ever to leave. Friends Journal has been on Bluesky for over a year and the discourse is simply better.
Religious-sounding language
December 5, 2024
Neiman Lab is a great group that studies journalism and they’ve come out with a “Predictions for Journalism, 2025″ list. Whitney Phillips has a great entry, “Religious-sounding language will be everywhere in 2025” that looks at the current vocabulary being promoted by so-called Christian Nationalists:
this language often centers, instead, on hatred of an amalgamated, shape-shifting, ultimately invented liberal devil that maps, as convenient, onto “the left,” the Democratic Party, “elites” somehow aligned with Marxism, and what Project 2025 describes as “the Great Awokening.” Spreading the Christian faith isn’t the point; fighting the liberal devil is. This devil is ultimately secular, based on things like DEI initiatives and the existence of trans people, and is also the quasi-religious antagonist in a decades-old cosmic showdown between the ultimate good of “real” America and the ultimate evil of leftists hell-bent on tearing it asunder.
Much of the worldview of these groups has little resemblance to the humility and meekness of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and I appreciate Phillips’s framing of it as “religious-sounding.” The nomination of the eminently unqualified train wreck that is Pete Hegseth has brought some of this to the forefront. A lot of the vitriol is based on classic antisemitic tropes; the absolutely bizarroworld claim that pets being eaten could have been lifted right out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “Religious freedom” is a rallying cry, and while I agree that it’s always a challenge to balance personal religious with civic norms, a lot of the complaints are rather petty. Some of these folks have latched onto Quaker figures, especially William Penn, to the point where I feel I need to fact check sources whenever I read anything about him any more.
It’s also very much the case that some of the people with deeply Christian worldviews are very decent, well-meaning people who would never think to do harm. Part of our work is to try to disentangle this all as best we could. This is far from the first time bad actors have sought to weaponize Jesus’s faith.
Hat tip Julie Peyton on Bluesky.