But let’s say you and I have put all our eggs into the Jesus basket. Abandoning nonviolence is simply not an option. What can we say that is different from the calculations of our peace-loving friends and neighbors who are casting about for political solutions and compromises when evidence suggests that the aggressor is completely uninterested in what we think of him?
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)
Quaker Spring 2022
May 10, 2022
My friend Peter Blood asked me to get out information on this year’s Quaker Spring gathering, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and online, at the end of June:
Are you familiar with Quaker Spring? It’s an unusual gathering — open-hearted, minimal advance programming. A journey each time we gather. It would be wonderful if some of you are able & led to join us in person but we know it is a long way. But, of course, it would also be wonderful to see some of you via Zoom!
In God’s loving care,
Peter
for the Quaker Spring Planning GroupMore information at: quakerspring.org/2022-gathering
Philadelphia YM on pamphlet series archive
April 14, 2022
I’ve already written about the digital republication of the classic William Penn Lecture series. But Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s post contained this great quote from Jim Rose:
Pendle Hill had a practice of asking week-long students to take on a job on Wednesday afternoon. One week my task was to clean/dust and arrange the books in the Upmeads library and in the process I found, high on an upper shelf, a whole series of dusty pamphlets called the William Penn Lectures. Inaccessible? You bet. A few months later I sojourned at Pendle Hill while my late wife was taking a week-long course. During that week I sat with my computer and scanned the text of those pamphlets. My intent was to make that body of literature more accessible to Quakers and others throughout the world on the internet. And recently that goal has been achieved.
I know Jim well from his time on Friends Journal’s board of trustees and making Quaker archives accessible is a great passion of his. He helped us tremendously in getting older articles indexed. That combined with the Haverford College Library’s digitalization of everything going back to 1955 means we’re relatively accessible.
Speaking of archives, it looks like I’ve been remiss sharing another amazing resource: the Salem (NJ) Quarter Tape Archive. Starting in the late 1970s, people started taping long interviews with Friends. They’ve sat gathering dust until they were pulled out an digitized. Regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of Rachel Davis DuBois and her interview by Charles Crabbe Thomas (number 13) is absolute gold.
William Penn Lecture Quaker archive now available
April 8, 2022
Speaking of Bayard Rustin, the printed version of the 1948 speech that is the subject of Carlos Figueroa’s recent Friends Journal article is now available as a free e‑book or PDF.
But not just that speech: Pendle Hill and Quaker Heron Press recently finished digitizing dozens of the William Penn/Seeking Faithfulness lectures dating back to 1916. It’s an amazing collection featuring a who’s-who of twentieth-century Friends and friends-of-Friends.
A warning that the selections reflect the prejudices of the day. As far as I can tell it took until the 1950s until lecture organizers thought to invite a woman. And of course naming your lecture after William Penn is seen as problematic today given his personal involvement in human trafficking. Back then they could overlook that to claim he endeavored “to live out the laws of Christ in every thought, and word, and deed.” In 2016 the revived lecture series was renamed.
Bayard Rustin in Friends Journal
April 7, 2022
In the magazine, Ithaca College’s Carlos Figueroa looks back at an important talk Bayard Rustin gave to the young Friends association in Philadelphia in 1948. It was a pivotal moment in a life that contained so many: Rustin had spent the early 1940s organizing with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and was recently released from a prison term for violating the Selective Service Act. This was his opportunity to lay out a pacifist politics for the Cold War era:
Rustin explicitly sought to persuade others into considering civil disobedience as a social democratic strategy for pursuing structural and policy change. Rustin advocated for a humanitarian, communal, and moralistic approach to change, thus disregarding an individual’s political affiliation, geographic location, or government system.
Over on YouTube, the newest episode of QuakerSpeak interviews Rustin’s partner Walter Naegle:
Bayard believed in the oneness of the human family, in the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people,” Walter says. “He believed in the power of nonviolence which comes out of that belief in the oneness of all people.… He saw everybody as equal in the eyes of the divine.
Rustin’s walk with Friends was rather complicated and he’s often not been given the recognition he deserves.
Johan Maurer on Inner Flashlights
April 1, 2022
I’ve written many times about the dumbing down of Quaker language into ever-more-ambiguous terms and like this latest blog post from Johan Maurer.
Whatever the causes, phrases such as “inner light” and “that of God” became even vaguer than they might have been individually. Increasingly, as some Friends meetings became gatherings of people who loved the atmosphere and found a refuge in the freedom of Quaker community, and as the surrounding culture became more hostile to claims of faith, the folkways of Quakerism became more important than the core teachings — at least in the London-Philadelphia axis and its offspring.
Let’s face it: that refuge became more important as certain quarters of Christianity became more obnoxious and authoritarian. It’s unfair to charge that hostility to Christianity simply became more fashionable. Too often, we Christians did it to ourselves, projecting a false certainty and a fearsome God instead of the actual Gospel.
He goes on to make the point that the Quaker avoidance of a kind of rigid certainty makes our faith inherently risky and it’s true, it’s always on the edge of either flying apart from centrifugal forces or collapsing in on itself in self-regard.
The Quaker Peace Testimony and Ukraine
March 31, 2022
Over on Friends Journal, the head of Sidwell Friends School on Quakers and pacifism is getting some attention, in part I think because it’s not absolutist on pacifism:
Quakers are short on dogma and long on discernment, a process that calls individuals to interrogate circumstances, seek truth, and act upon their conscience. Over the centuries individual Quakers have engaged in warfare provided they deemed the cause just. Somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of eligible U.S. and British Quakers fought in World War I, and approximately three-quarters chose to bear arms in World War II.
History is history, of course, and Friends’ attitudes have actually been more fluid than our peace testimony would let on. The first rejoinder online comes from Don Badgley:
So, let us be clear; without the direct and present leadership of the Divine Source, our so-called “testimonies” crumble to dust. Absent that One Source these “testimonies” are little more than religio-political posturing, relics — and impossible to justify, especially within the context of the actual evil we see in the world today. Alternatively, when we testify to the whole world about the life-altering Truths that originate in our Experience of the Divine Presence, that ministry is imbued with a vital, even miraculous power.
As in most things Quaker, I find myself intellectually in agreement with both of them (we’ve got a complicated history). I’m personally quite pacifist. Even defensive wars kill innocents and liberatory good guys have become tyrants over and over again in history. But I have to admit I’ve been quite grateful to see Ukrainians successfully holding the Russian army at bay. I think it’s possible for pacifists to be strategic and even have an edge of realpolitik as we question war-making, both philosophically and tactically.
Cesar Chavez Day memories
March 31, 2022
Every year around Cesar Chavez day I look for traces of my involvement with him. In the spring of 1987 he came to my college campus to recruit an annual mini-army of college interns to work on whatever campaign the United Farm Workers were organizing that summer. I was back from a two-week, semi-authorized drop-out for a peace march and was intrigued with its glimpse into alternative communities. Now here was an opportunity to work with a living nonviolence legend: yes please!
Much of the actual work turned out to be pretty meaningless, I must admit. I did a lot of cold calling to church answering machines to tell them about a video we were going to mail out to them (“narrated by Mike Farrell!”). But the context of the experience was great: living in a rented house with other UFW interns in East Brunswick, N.J. (one of whom became a serious relationship); working in New York at a revolving number of desks at whatever union would lend us a room; discovering cheese enchiladas via Cesar’s always kind daughter Linda; commuting into pre-gentrification Tribeca listening to some atrocious 1980s bubblegum pop station because that’s what Linda’s tween daughters Olivia and Julia liked.
In July, we organized an event back in Philly for Cesar: a protest outside the A&P stockholder meeting pressuring them to stop selling grapes treated with pesticides. I did a lot of organizing around this: writing first drafts of press releases, helping to get local labor unions out to the event to boost numbers. Googling this morning I found the photo above, taken at the event. That’s Cesar’s son-in-law and my boss Artie Rodriguez behind him to the right. I would have been somewhere nearby just out of camera reach. The caption reads:
Farm leader Cesar Chavez speaks to a group of supporters in Philadelphia 7/9 outside the hotel where the A&P stockholders were holding their annual meeting. Chavez supporters were demanding that the supermarket chain stop selling California grapes that are contacted with pesticides that cause cancer.
It would probably stun kids today that before cell phones many of us just didn’t take pictures. Despite working with him for an extended summer, and walking with him in the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, I have no pictures of myself with Cesar (I do have a cardboard poster I probably drew in ten minutes, which he signed). But I have memories of that summer 35 (!) years ago. He was always kind and funny and surprisingly down to earth. His charisma brought together an interesting collection of followers and I was glad to be one.