Steven Davison looks at a proposal to record members at the yearly meeting level:
without meaningful pastoral care, regular worship, spiritual nurture, and a fellowship that goes deeper than just three annual meetings could provide, what does “membership” mean? All that’s left is Quaker identity and a sense of belonging to the unique spiritual community that is New York Yearly Meeting. To me, that’s a half-baked Quaker life.
High Profiles magazine has published a nice interview with Alastair McIntosh, a Quaker academic, author, and activist. It’s not all about his Quakerism but then it’s nice to see someone using it as a just a piece of their identity. I love seeing our roots laid out in the same sentence as a critique of the Murdoch press, etc.
The North is the part of England to which the radicals retreated under Norman violence, and I suspect that’s part of why the more radical side of England comes out there. Quakerism developed mainly in the north and west of England and I suspect that nonconformity comes out of that radical spirit – which needs to be rekindled, not in ways manipulated by the Murdoch press or the Conservative Party or Ukip but much more in the way that William Blake understood, of connecting with the spirit of the land.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that we ran a nice piece by McIntosh in the February issue of Friends Journal. He talked about Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk with Quaker roots. Again, our spirituality in context.
A cynic might file this under “hope springs eternal”:
A phrase that keeps coming to mind is “a new Quakerism,” and oddly enough, I’ve been hearing other Friends unknowingly echo this phrase back to me. It seems to me that many Friends, even those who consider themselves “convinced,” are hungry for more than what the Society has to offer.
Of course it’s part of our tradition that it needs to be forever reborn. You can’t recycle sermons or use the prop of your university learning as a crutch. We are never to know what might happen when worship starts, since the idea is that it’s directly led in the moment by Christ. It’s also a part of our tradition that forms are forever calcifying and that we need to remember why we’re here and who’s brought us together. Glad to see the work continue.
Here’s a from-the-archives piece I stumbled again on recently. It’s from New England historian Betsy Cazden, whose insights on Quaker culture I adore. She wrote this for Friends Journal in 2006:
How did Friends come to do so well? The standard story is a variant on the Puritan one: Quakers became wealthy by working diligently; extending their experimental approach to religion to invent new industrial technologies; trading honestly (thereby attracting customers); making productive use of transatlantic kinship networks; and living frugally, without money-drains like drinking or gambling, thereby freeing up money for savings, investment, and philanthropic giving to Quaker-run institutions. All of that may be true, but is at best partial. The unspoken “rest of the story” has two pieces: land and slaves.
I’m sure I’ve read this article before (I unconsciously summarized it this past May) but I think it’s an important discussion to rethink every so often.
One thing I love about the Friends movement is its ability to live within the tensions of a being both a deeply spiritual ascetic practice and a strategically focused world-changing social action toolkit. Sometimes the two come together in wonderful ways. QuakerSpeak has a mini-documentary about the Earth Quaker Action Team’s campaign to stop PNC Bank from financing mountaintop removal mining:
George Lakey: So any way you look at it, this is an offense against the planet. It’s an offense against people. It’s where economic justice and climate justice coincide. Let’s tackle it.
Ingrid Lakey: This bank that had Quaker roots, this bank that called itself the greenest bank in the business was in fact blowing up mountains to get coal which is a major contributor to climate change. So we thought, “that’s not cool! We can’t let that slide.” Calling on our own belief in our integrity, we decided to call them out on it.
I myself could watch a whole video of George Lakey just laughing. I’ve attended a few EQAT actions over the years and wrote a personal story about my participation in a public fast in 2013.
http://quakerspeak.com/how-a-small-group-of-quaker-activists-took-on-pnc-bank-and-won/
From a book review by Mackenzie Morgan on the Quaker Outreach site:
Often churches that fail to reflect their changing local community die off in a generation or two. Implicit bias has been a point of discussion in some yearly meetings in recent years, and this is related.
In fact, a Friend once told me they’d been asked, “can we target these Facebook ads only to people who are just like us?”
Actually, Facebook can create what they call lookalike audiences. It’s very cool and very creepy at the same time. It’s part of the suite of fine-grain targeting tools that’s letting political propagandists and lifestyle-focused companies control our media consumption at the social feed level and reinforce liked-minded groupthink. Attention silos are dangerous for our democracy and they’re no good for our churches. If the Quaker good news has any meaning left in it, it has to be widely applicable outside of our cultural, style bubbles.
“One aspect of sustainability that has particular importance for me personally concerns what we eat and how it is made. While the pitiful lives of animals in factory farms have been well-documented, what is also becoming more well-known is the tremendous impact eating animal products has on the environment.”
Jessica Kellgren-Fozard is a disabled TV presenter with 266,000+ followers on YouTube. She’s also a lifelong Friend from the UK. She’s just released a video in which she talks about her understanding of Quakerism. It’s pretty good. She occasionally implies that some specifically British procedural process is intrinsic to all Quakers but other than that it all rings true, certainly to her experience as a UK Friend.
I must admit that the world of YouTube stars is foreign to me. This is essentially a webcam vlog post but the lighting and hair and costuming is meticulous. Her notes include affiliate links for the dress she’s wearing ($89 and yes, they ship internationally), a 8 1/2 minute video tutorial about curling you hair in her vintage style (it has over 33,000 views). If you follow her on Instagram and Twitter you’ll soon have enough details on lipstick and shoe choices to be able to fully cosplay her.
But don’t laugh too much, because in between the self presentation tips, Kellgren-Fozard tackles really hard subjects – growing up gay in school, living with disabilities – in ways that are approachable and intimate, funny and instructive. And with a quarter million YouTube followers, she’s reaching people with a message of kindness and inclusion and understanding that feels pretty Quakerly to me. Margaret Fell liked herself a red dress sometimes and it’s easy to argue George Fox would be a YouTuber today.
Bonus: Jessica Kellgren-Fozard will host a live Q&A chat on her Quakerism this coming Monday. If I’m calculating my timezones correctly, it’ll be noon here on the U.S. East Coast. I plan to tune in.
Friends Journal 