Chris Gethard and Stephen Colbert with a new elevator-pitch for Friends.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Talkative Friends
February 21, 2018
Most-commented articles on Friends Journal website of all time. February’s article on the vision of Quakerism by Don McCormick has been a surprise rocket to #2, but no one is likely to ever catch Su Penn’s piece from 2013.
Long shadows
February 21, 2018
A warm playground day but the shadows are still February’s. 
Fiery Feeds 2 review
February 21, 2018
For a medium that’s always declared nearly dead (RSS), there sure are a lot of great iOS apps..
Fiery Feeds has grown into a cleaner, more elegant client that looks nicer on iOS 11 and the iPhone X; at the same time, Burgstaller has been able to extend Fiery Feeds’ appeal with a powerful premium-only feature dubbed Smart Views.
Weymouth NJ Church
February 14, 2018
Weymouth NJ Church
Wait, a new Quaker blog, what retroness is this?
February 14, 2018
And just as we’re talking about the continued downward entropy of blogging, here’s a new Quaker blog. Isaac Smith of Frederick (Md.) Meeting (and Twitter) has the first post in a time-limited, “pop-up” blog. He’s calling it “The Anarchy of the Ranters.” I’ll overlook the similarity to this blog’s name in the hope that the people who have been dropping comments on mine since 2004 asking about the difference between Quakers and Ranters will start bothering him now.
The first post is “Defensiveness as a Theological Problem for Friends,” a good blogging debut.
The question of who belongs in the church, which has always been of central importance, is what’s at stake here, and unfortunately, it is often being answered in ways that are hurtful and alienating — the opposite of what the gospel promises.
Jason Kottke on blogging, 2018 edition
February 14, 2018
Two things on the internet that I consistently like are NeimanLab and Kottke.org. The former is Harvard’s journalism foundation and its associated blog. They consistently publish thought-provoking lessons from media pioneers. If there’s an interesting online publishing model being tried, Neiman Labs will profile it. Kottke is one of the original old school blogs. Jason highlights things that are interesting to him and by and large, most of the posts happen to be interesting to me. He’s also one of the few breakout blogging stars who has kept going.
So today Neiman Labs posted an interview with Jason Kottke. Of course I like it.
There are a few things that Jason has done that I find remarkable. One is that he’s threaded an almost impossible path that has held back the centrifugal forces of the modern internet. He never went big and he never went small. By big, I mean he never tried to ramp his site up to become a media empire. No venture capitalist money, no clickbait headlines, no pivot to video or other trendy media chimera. He also didn’t go small: his blog has never been a confessional. While that traffic when to Facebook, his kind of curated links and thoughts is something that still works best as a blog.
Although I don’t blog myself too much anymore, I do think a lot about media models for Friends Journal. Its reliance on non-professional opinion writing prefigured blogs. It’s a fully digital magazine now, even as it continues as a print magazine. The membership model Kottke talks about (and Neiman Labs frequently profiles) is a likely one for us going into the long term.
Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20
November Flashbacks
November 4, 2017
Once a month I’m doing flashbacks to past eras in my blog.
One Year Ago: November 2016
A year ago the shock to the system was Trump’s election. One reaction of mine was a promise to blog more; I set up the system but I’m still not as frictionless about it as I’d like.
Waking Up to President Trump: We do not get to choose our era or the challenges it throws at us. Only someone with historical amnesia would say this is unprecedented in our history. The enslavement of millions and the genocide of millions more are dark stains indelibly soaked into the very founding of the nation. But much will change, particularly our naivity and false optimism in an inevitable forward progress of our national story.
Five Years Ago: November 2012
Five years ago I wrote about how I had been blogging for fifteen years. Do the math: it’s now 20 frigging years since I started blogging.
Fifteen Years of Blogging: I keep double-checking the math but it keeps adding up. In November 1997 I added a feature to my two-year-old peace website. I called this new entity Nonviolence Web Upfront and updated it weekly with original features and curated links to the best online pacifist writing. I wrote a retrospective of the “early blogging days” in 2005 that talks about how it came about and gives some context about the proto-blogs happening back in 1997.
Ten Years Ago: November 2007
Freelancing and working the overnight shift at Shoprite, I wondered if my Quakerness was hopelessly useless to my new circumstances.
Who are we part one (just what pamphlet do I give the tattooed ex-con?): I love the fellow who gave the message and I appreciated his ministry. But the whole time I wondered how this would sound to people I know now, like the friendly but hot-tempered Puerto Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in federal prison, now working two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and trying to stay out of trouble. How does the theory of our theology fit into a code of conduct that doesn’t start off assuming middle class norms.
Twenty Years Ago: November 1997
Four years before 9/11, I was asking how we could break the cycle of terrorism.
How Come the U.S. Trains All the Terrorists?: It would seem a simple case of U.S. militarism coming home to roost, but it is not so simple and it is not uncommon. Follow most trails of terrorism and you’ll find United States government funding somewhere in the recent past.