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FedUpMom: An insider/outsider’s look at Quaker schools
Ah, Friends schools — where Protestants teach Jews how to be Quakers. It’s a beautiful thing… I attended a Quaker school myself for a couple of years, and it pretty well cured me of any interest in Quakerism. I personally don’t believe that you can improve religion by throwing out all the art, music, and ritual… The Quaker meeting, which is a lot of silence broken by the musings of the pompous, is a practice I can do without.
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Iris reads Margery Abbott’s “To be Broken and Tender”
I’m still learning to trust the healing power of my own words. Remembering I’m loved takes regular reminders. How often I slip back into worries about whether I’m doing enough, preoccupied with concern I’ll be judged or criticized or compared to others. I’m grateful Marge has heeded her call to ministering with words and for sharing her own story of “being broken open by God’s love.
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Isabel Penraeth: Advices and Queries for Isolated Friends
I have contemplated OYM’s Queries and Advices regularly as part of my own spiritual practice for a number of years. Over time, I felt that it would be good to re-work them slightly to emphasize the challenges that I face as an isolated Friend and to leave aside sections that don’t apply to my life as a Friend without a meeting for a spiritual home.
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Steven Davison: The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic & the Capitalist Spirit
When you cannot achieve grace through sacraments, good works or confession, the only proof of grace is a way of life that is unmistakably different from that of others. This requires a certain withdrawal from the world. It requires the individual to supervise her own state of grace in her conduct — that is, it permeates the life with asceticism, forcing the “rationalization of conduct within the world for the sake of the world beyond,” as Weber put it.
I want to say to the mom who had it with Quaker schools & Meeting how I can totally relate to that experience 30, even 50 years ago, and there is a lot about Quaker schools today that trouble me. But today, art and music are part of Friends schools and many Friends Meetings. And practice of eldering, which was then practiced in very pompous and negative ways, has been transformed to a more nurturing exercise. I hope that the writer has found a warm, spiritually nurturing environment since Quakers did NOt achieve that for you. God’s love, of course, is everywhere…