Filed in the “whaaa?” department: I find this more curious and surprising than enlightening but the author is a bone fide Friend who argues that the evolution of the internet is analogous to a Quaker model of organization.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Category Archives ⇒ Quaker
As the blog name implies, I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends, known colloquially as Quakers. Many of my blog posts deal with issues of our society and its interactions with the larger world. I generally only include my own posts in this list. I share many many Quaker links in my Links Blog category and on QuakerQuaker.
Important Posts:
The Lost Quaker Generation (2003)
Peace and Twenty-Somethings (2003)
We’re All Ranters Now (2003)
Passing the Faith, Planet of the Quaker Style (2004)
Quaker Testimonies (2004)
Hey, Who Am I To Decide Anything? (2007)
The Biggest Most Vibranty Most Outreachiest Program Ever (2010)
Getting a Horse to Drink (on Philadelphia YM) (2010)
Tell Them All This But Don’t Expect Them to Listen (2010)
Forbes Brooklyn Friends support a youth-led outreach music and arts show
March 28, 2023
Supporting younger Friends in an outreach effort, by Kristen Cole:
A few weeks before the show, one of the adult organizers made an announcement about the upcoming show at the rise of meeting for worship. He explained, “We did a really radical thing. We asked our teens what they would want to do if they could organize an event for young people. And they told us. And we listened.” At a time when we are deeply engaged in conversations about the direction of Quakerism, it’s powerful to be reminded that building toward our future might be easier to achieve if we open our hearts and minds and listen to the next generation.
Read more at Finding the Divine in a Mosh Pit. This is from the March edition of Spark, New York Yearly Meeting’s publication, which focuses on the arts this issue.
Be sure to scroll to the bottom of Cole’s article for a disclaimer about the mosh pit (spoiler: there wasn’t one). It made me wonder if kids still mosh. Wikipedia dates the practice to 1980. I’m sure some do, as we live in an age of evergreen sub-genres. The availability of music and video on-demand and the ability to quickly organize communities via app make every era easily accessible. I’ve lost track of how many 80s revivals we’ve gone through.
But concerts these days are so mediated by cell phones. Even I find myself taking it out when the first chords of a favorite song start up. And even if you yourself resist, others will have their phones out videoing you. I’m fascinated by the videos of high school kids from the 1980s that sometime get posted on YouTube. They’re so unfazed by the camera, which would have been some bulky Hi8 camcorder, probably because they figured no one would actually ever look at the footage. It’s hard to imagine the wild abandon and non-self-consciousness of 1980s moshing when you know any awkward move you make might show up on Tiktok or Insta the next day.
Quakers on Wikipedia
March 27, 2023
Steven Davison on how Wikipedia describes Quakers—and how we might respond.
This raises a concern for me about how the Quaker movement might oversee this kind of public presentation of our faith and practice going forward. In the spirit of Wikipedia’s platform as a peer-to-peer project, and in keeping with the non-hierarchical governance structures so important to Friends, and, of course, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I propose a peer-to-peer process for the oversight of such presentations, a long-range project of review that would hopefully include Friends with real expertise in the many areas of Quaker history, faith, and practice covered in this entry and whatever other entries we find
This relates to a long-term concern of mine that so much of the most public information on Friends isn’t created by us. Wikipedia’s relatively benign (there’s actually a bit of a Quaker process connection) but our participation on social media like Facebook and Twitter are mediated by algorithms favoring controversy. I edit Wikipedia entries a couple of times a year but am also a small part of Friends Journal efforts to built out Quaker.org to make it a useful, accurate, and publicly visible introduction to the Religious Society of Friends.
There’s some good discussion on Mastodon by some Wikipedia editors who explain that Davison’s plan would be seen with some suspicion by Wikipedia. As commenter Dan York wrote:
Wikipedia has a very strong ethos around “conflict of interest” with the sense that people too close to a topic can’t write in a neutral point-of-view. There’s definitely value in folks working to improve the pages, but they need to keep these views in mind — and back up everything they do with reliable sources.
Belonging: The Community or the Institution (12/37)
March 21, 2023
Quaker membership has long been a contentious issue for thr past few decades (Why should someone join? What does it mean? What linits should there be?) but it’s becoming more complicated with the rise of hybrid worship. Emily Provance looks at thr state of membership and how it’s evolving.
A lot of the work done about membership lately, especially by young adults, has been about helping Friends in general understand that the institutional practices need to change to reflect what God is doing in our communities.
Hard questions on Ukraine invasion anniversary
March 16, 2023
Quakers have been asking some very hard questions about their testimony to peace and their forms of pacifism following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. They are hard because there are no simple right answers.
Oooh!, a Quaker zine
March 6, 2023
Wess Daniels got a pack of Quaker zines in the mail. That’s right, physical paper:
A few weeks back, I got some mail from someone I didn’t know. As I opened it, these cute little booklets fell out, and a letter addressed to me: Hello, Mr. Daniels. The letter writer, Pacific Northwest Quaker Natalie Ramsland, told me a little about how she came into zine making and why she was sending me some of her zines.
That’s very cool! I zined back in college: “The Vacuum” ran every Friday for most of two years. When I was doing a nonviolence website in the mid-90s it seemed natural to apply this model and I accidentally started blogging, complete with mirroring it to an email list (I wrote “Fifteen Years of Blogging” eleven years ago, whoa!). Now my blog automatically goes out by email on Fridays. There’s such an obvious through-line between the 90s zine and my ongoing blogging (and obviously we have weekly content cycles for Friends Journal too).
I love the idea of paper zines coming back though their limit has always been that the best distribution is local and misses those of us out of the geographic loop.
Zine-makerNatalie also has a Substack, which I’ll be reading eagerly.
What would you like to see in Friends Journal?
February 22, 2023
Every eighteen months or so Friends Journal start brainstorming new themes and boil them down into a list. We’re now plotting out themes for the spring of 2024 and beyond. Part of this process is asking readers what they’d like to see us cover and if you follow FJ on Facebook, Twitter, or Mastodon, you’ve probably seen us asking there. But I would also like to hear from Quaker Ranter readers:
What topics would YOU like to see Friends Journal addressing in the future?
We’ve been running themed issues for over a decade now. Check out the list of themes since 2012 or look through the archives to reminiscence about past issues. There’s a good chance we’ve already covered the subject you’re interested in, but it might be a good time for us to take a new look or a fresh spin. Leave a comment here or email me at martin@friendsjournal.org with any ideas you have.
25th anniversary of my NYTimes profile
February 21, 2023
It makes me feel old to admit to a quarter-century anniversary for something that happened in my early thirties but 25 years ago today, New York Times published a profile of my work on Nonviolence.org. Thanks to a great archive section, you can still read it on their website.
While many orgs have public relations departments dedicated to planting stories, this one happened pretty organically. I followed Lisa Napoli’s work in what the Times then called its “Cybertimes” section (a precursor to the less cringey “Tech” section of today) and liked her articles. It was seven years after the first Gulf War and President Clinton was saber rattling in Iraq again. I wondered how the peace movement would organize differently now that the internet was becoming a real organizing tool and I suspected Napoli might be interested. I shot an email and she responded immediately and set up an interview. A photographer came to my house and took a lot of pictures (including a really cringey one of me playing a guitar that graced the Cybertimes front page but has not been archived, thank goodness.)
It’s especially funny to me to see how dated some of the language and references are.