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)

Who’s the misfit?

March 18, 2021
· Martin Kelley

Some time back in the 1990s I attend­ed a retreat at Cen­tral Philadel­phia Friends Meet­ing. One exer­cise broke us up into small groups of about eight Friends. I for­get the exact query we were asked to con­sid­er but I remem­ber being sur­prised and then shocked as one Friend after anoth­er con­fessed that they wor­ried they weren’t a good enough Quaker.

Let me assure you these Friends were a sol­id cross-section of the meet­ing’s most respon­si­ble and spir­i­tu­al­ly ground­ed mem­bers, a few of them well-known in the year­ly meet­ing and in nation­al Quak­er circles.

If these Friends weren’t prop­er Friends, who the heck was?

There’s all sorts of poten­tial rea­sons for this sort of impos­tor syn­drome. Those of us who weren’t born in the reli­gious soci­ety don’t have the pedi­gree, per­haps? Maybe we did­n’t go a Quak­er school. Maybe we don’t have the silki­est tongues or flu­en­cy in Quak­erese while give Quak­er min­istry. It’s easy to feel out­side if you’re the wrong race or eth­nic­i­ty, if you’re too loud or too opin­ion­at­ed. But I think part of it is also a long his­to­ry of idol­iz­ing a few cer­tain fig­ures in the dis­tant past. Who of us is up there with Ben­jamin Lay or Lucre­tia Mott or John Wool­man? (This goes the oth­er direc­tion too, in which we some­times over­claim these folks. See Gab­breell James’s “We Are Not John Wool­man.”)

In the first video of Quak­er­S­peak’s eight sea­son, Mary Lin­da McK­in­ney asks, Am I Good Enough to Be a Quaker?

I always march to my own drum­mer and my drum­mer doesn’t play the type of music that any­body around me ever wants to hear. I’m pret­ty much a mis­fit in any com­mu­ni­ty that I’m around, and that includes Quak­ers… But spir­i­tu­al­ly to be a good Quak­er is to seek the will of God as an indi­vid­ual and cor­po­ral­ly with oth­ers, and from that per­spec­tive I feel like I’m a good Quak­er because I do want to live my life let­ting God’s will flow through me and I want to do that in com­mu­ni­ty with others 

I think the RSOF can use all the mis­fits it can attract.

An intro to Barclay’s Apology

March 18, 2021
· Martin Kelley

Over on the Wood­brooke web­site, Rhi­an­non Grant makes a case for why this ear­ly Quak­er text is still rel­e­vant.

Work­ing through a text like this can be reward­ing. Although some ques­tions seem very dif­fer­ent in today’s world, there are many points which seem rel­e­vant. Like some oth­er ear­ly Quak­er writ­ers, he gives mov­ing descrip­tions of meet­ing for wor­ship and the spir­i­tu­al effects it can have. He has a knack for vivid images which clar­i­fy some the­o­log­i­cal ques­tions… His insis­tence on the impor­tance of wait­ing to be led by the Spir­it before we speak in wor­ship, teach, or offer oth­er kinds of min­istry is still rel­e­vant to my Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty. And even when I dis­agree with him, I find it use­ful to be prompt­ed to think through ques­tions from his perspective. 

William Penn’s 12 slaves (a citation mystery)

March 17, 2021
· Martin Kelley

There has been renewed atten­tion in Quak­er cir­cles to William Pen­n’s slave­hold­ing in recent years. Late last year, the board that man­ages the William Penn House in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., decid­ed to embark on a renam­ing process because of the slav­ery, a deci­sion that has spawned a num­ber of seem­ing­ly end­less com­ment threads on Face­book, like this one. One thing that’s fas­ci­nat­ing is that many of the new advo­cates have set­tled on a spe­cif­ic num­ber of slaves. From Friends Com­mit­tee on Nation­al Leg­is­la­tion:

Despite his con­tri­bu­tion to U.S. his­to­ry and his inten­tions of found­ing a colony built on “broth­er­ly love,” William Penn owned 12 slaves in his estate, Pennsbury.

Twelve slaves. As part of my job is fact-checking, I like to double-check num­bers like that. Penns­bury Manor, the muse­um devot­ed to Pen­n’s life in his colony, just refers to a slave com­mu­ni­ty and pro­vides five names (Sam, Sue, Yaff, Jack, and Peter). So how has 12 become a cit­ed num­ber? Let’s go diving.

I don’t know FCN­L’s sources but a recent edi­to­r­i­al sub­mis­sion came to me in recent months cit­ing an August 2020 arti­cle by Michaela Win­berg in the online pub­li­ca­tion Bil­ly Penn, “William Penn kept enslaved peo­ple. These are some of their names”:

The records that exist aren’t total­ly clear, but it seems as if Penn enslaved rough­ly 12 peo­ple at his Penns­bury Manor estate, which was locat­ed in what is now the Philly sub­urbs. These peo­ple were pur­chased off the first slave ship known to have arrived in Philadel­phia, and were of African and Car­ribean [sic] descent.

I’m a fan of Bil­ly Penn but it’s not an aca­d­e­m­ic source. For­tu­nate­ly they gave a link to their asser­tion, a Sep­tem­ber 2012 arti­cle by Jack H. Schick in… oh dear, my own pub­li­ca­tion, Friends Jour­nal!In “Slav­ery in Penn­syl­va­nia” he wrote:

Quak­ers, though con­cerned and in the fore­front of efforts to end the insti­tu­tion of slav­ery, were not inno­cent. While liv­ing on his estate at Penns­bury Manor, before he returned to Eng­land for­ev­er in 1701, William Penn kept 12 slaves.

No cita­tion was giv­en but as Jack­’s edi­tor I can affirm he is fond of Wikipedia. I’m fair­ly con­fi­dent that he got his ref­er­ence from this entry, “His­to­ry of slav­ery in Penn­syl­va­nia”:

William Penn, the pro­pri­etor of the Province of Penn­syl­va­nia, held 12 slaves as work­ers on his estate, Penns­bury. They took part in con­struc­tion of the main house and out­build­ings. Penn left the colony in 1701, and nev­er returned.

If you ask Google “How many slaves did Penn have?” it gives you “12 slaves” as its instant answer and links to this Wikipedia page. Giv­en that the all-knowing search engine thinks this a vet­ted answer wor­thy of a 32-pixel head­line, how much can we trust it?

The imme­di­ate answer is: not much. Wikipedia has no cita­tion (as of this writ­ing; I should prob­a­bly go edit it myself). The trail would go cold there if not for the plat­for­m’s obses­sion with keep­ing its revi­sion his­to­ry. Through that one can find that the claim on Pen­n’s slaves dates to the Octo­ber 2007 cre­ation of the entry.

William Penn, the founder of the Penn­syl­va­nia colony, owned 12 slaves on his estate, Penns­bury; how­ev­er, he grad­u­al­ly became a sup­port­er of the abo­li­tion of the institution.

Thir­teen years of edits has reworked the sen­tence quite a bit but the 12 num­ber remains from the begin­ning and in that first Wikipedia draft there was a cita­tion to a USHis​to​ry​.org page. This is a still-extant web­site pro­duced by the Inde­pen­dence Hall Asso­ci­a­tion, a Penn­syl­va­nia non­prof­it found­ed in 1942. The process of link rot is at work, alas, and Wikipedi­a’s 2007 link gives a “page not found” today. Thank­ful­ly Archive​.org can take us back in the ear­ly aughts and let us read it in all of its early-oughts design glo­ry (it takes me back to see a back­ground image used to cre­ate a col­umn!). The USHis­to­ry post is just a cut-and-paste of a 2003 arti­cle in the Philadel­phia Inquir­er (again, acces­si­ble thanks to Archive​.org). Reporter Melis­sa Dribben’s lede goes right to the point:

William Penn owned at least 12 slaves. Dur­ing his life he grad­u­al­ly came around to advo­cat­ing abo­li­tion, but when he died in 1718, Penn­syl­va­nia was a long way from end­ing the practice.

Fur­ther down she men­tions Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soder­lund and their 1991 book, Free­dom by Degrees: Eman­ci­pa­tion in Penn­syl­va­nia and Its After­math. For the first time in this train of cita­tions we’ve actu­al­ly come to trained his­to­ri­ans! And I’d be hard pressed to think of any two aca­d­e­mics I would trust more to doc­u­ment this era of colo­nial Penn­syl­va­nia than Nash or Soder­lund. It’s long out of print but Google Book­s’s pre­view gives us the moth­er lode:

Quak­er pro­pri­etor and his asso­ciates made no effort to pro­hib­it black slav­ery in the City of Broth­er­ly Love and its envi­rons. Indeed, Penn owned at least twelve slaves him­self and stat­ed at one point that he pre­ferred them to white inden­tured ser­vants because slaves could be held for life. Though in one ear­ly will the pro­pri­etor pro­vid­ed for man­u­mis­sion, slaves worked on his Penns­bury estate in Bucks Coun­ty through­out his tenure. One of these slaves was Black Alice who died in 1802 at age 116. She recalled often light­ing the pro­pri­etor’s pipe.13

The para­graph has a cita­tion [see update, below] but the lim­it­ed Google Books pre­view does­n’t include the cita­tion index and used copies are a bit too pricey for me (by chance I am cur­rent­ly read­ing Nash’s very fas­ci­nat­ing Forg­ing Free­dom, which is avail­able as a used book for a much more rea­son­able price).

I do wish that this trail of cita­tions did­n’t end at a book that’s cel­e­brat­ing its thir­ty year anniver­sary. I’m sure we’ve had a num­ber of ambi­tious his­to­ri­ans dig­ging through base­ment archives since the ear­ly 90s. Sure­ly they’ve uncov­ered more evi­dence. (For exam­ple, Black Alice, a fas­ci­nat­ing fig­ure, seems not to have been Pen­n’s slave at Penns­bury but instead was enslaved by fellow-Quaker Samuel Car­pen­ter, a friend of Penn, and own­er of an oys­ter house where Alice worked from age five.) But at least this one asser­tion — that Penn owned exact­ly or around or over twelve slaves — has a sol­id aca­d­e­m­ic source at its root.

Update March 18, 2021:

I emailed Jean R. Soder­lund, who gave me the sources for that para­graph in Free­dom by Degrees!

The cita­tions in note 13 are: Dunn et al., eds, Papers of William Penn, 3:66 – 67; 4:113 – 14; Han­nah Penn to James Logan June 6, 1720, and Logan to Han­nah Penn, May 11, 1721, Penn Papers, Offi­cial Cor­re­spon­dence, 1:95, 97, HSP; Samuel P. Jan­ney, The Life of William Penn (reprint 1970), 421; Nash, Forg­ing Free­dom, 12.

She did quite a bit of work dig­ging through the records con­cern­ing Pennbury after pub­lish­ing the book and says “I don’t remem­ber being con­cerned about the ref­er­ence to ‘at least twelve’ in Free­dom by Degrees.”

I’ve also edit­ed Wikipedia. Thirteen-plus years after their stat showed up on the “His­to­ry of slav­ery in Penn­syl­va­nia” page, Nash and Soder­lund final­ly get the citation.

Getting meeting minutes in the news

March 17, 2021
· Martin Kelley

Nice opin­ion piece in a pub­li­ca­tion called CT Mir­ror from “Twelve Con­necti­cut Quak­ers,” Quak­ers and soli­tary con­fine­ment: We thought it was a good idea. Now we don’t!

It starts with the well-known sto­ry of nine­teenth cen­tu­ry Quak­er prison reform­ers who with good inten­tions invent­ed soli­tary con­fine­ment at the East­ern State Pen­i­ten­tiary in Philadel­phia. It then goes on to talk about mod­ern prison-reform advo­cates. It namechecks Michelle Alexan­der, talks about the U.S. Soli­tary Con­fine­ment Study and Reform Act of 2019 and sim­i­lar leg­is­la­tion in states.

Almost two cen­turies after the East­ern State Pen­i­ten­tiary opened, Quak­ers and their orga­ni­za­tions (e.g. local and region­al Meet­ings, Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee, Friends Com­mit­tee on Nation­al Leg­is­la­tion) are work­ing to end the prac­tice that we had a hand in cre­at­ing. We urge you to join us! 

Toward the end they quote a minute from the meet­ing. I’m some­times a lit­tle weary of polit­i­cal min­utes that nev­er see the light of day out­side of the busi­ness meet­ing but this arti­cle is a great exam­ple of inte­grat­ing that into a strong arti­cle in a local news out­let. Kudos to the twelve Con­necti­cuters (yes I had to look up that denonym).

Guilford and ESR: Quaker institutions in trouble

December 18, 2020
· Martin Kelley

Johan Mau­r­er has a good run-down at con­tro­ver­sies brew­ing at Earl­ham School of Reli­gion. I’m very wor­ried about it. I’ve known the sud­den­ly oust­ed dean Matt His­rich for years through blogs, Twit­ter, and a face-to-face hand­shake or two and I read his hon­est memo to staff last week. He’s always impressed me as impas­sioned, fun­ny, and full of integri­ty. His memo was con­cern­ing but seemed well-reasoned and fair. The larg­er com­mu­ni­ty should know what’s going on. That Earl­ham Col­lege took half of ESR’s endow­ment is a very wor­ri­some development.

Guil­ford Col­lege in North Car­oli­na has been going through sim­i­lar tri­als. Its new pres­i­dent has pro­posed dra­con­ian cuts across major lib­er­al arts depart­ments that would evis­cer­ate the school and its Quak­er her­itage. A huge out­cry from alums has been orga­nized at Saveg​uil​ford​col​lege​.com. Guil­ford’s board vot­ed on the pro­pos­al this week and decid­ed to step back from this plan and study it some more but the future of the col­lege is still very cloudy.

Many Friends who are pas­sion­ate about the future of our reli­gious soci­ety end up at places like Earl­ham, ESR, and Guil­ford and they come out now just with degrees, but with skills to help fash­ion that future. Grad­u­ates of these schools are over-represented in the mate­r­i­al Friends Jour­nal pub­lish­es. If some­thing hap­pened to these insti­tu­tions it would be a hard blow to the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends1.  What hap­pens to them should be of con­cern to all of us. And what is hap­pen­ing should be transparent.

Faith and practice, language and witness

December 15, 2020
· Martin Kelley

From Steven Davi­son:

I car­ry a min­istry that forms a recur­ring theme in this blog: that our social wit­ness min­utes ought to express our Quak­er faith explic­it­ly as the heart of our tes­ti­mo­ni­al rhetoric. In my expe­ri­ence, they rarely do. Instead they use the mind­set and rhetoric of social change non­prof­its. They employ argu­ments from sci­ence and social sci­ence, and use sta­tis­tics, rather than a straight­for­ward­ly moral argu­ment. Very often, you would nev­er know a reli­gious orga­ni­za­tion had writ­ten them, let alone a Quak­er meeting. 

In his post he rewrites a recent minute on cli­mate change. It’s an inter­est­ing experiment.

I must admit I’ve rolled my eyes more than once over min­utes. I remem­ber one some years back that went into detail about pro­posed mis­sile sys­tems and the minu­tia of glob­al nuclear deter­rence pol­i­cy (my mem­o­ry is that it was writ­ten by a high school math teacher but that might be an embell­ish­ment). I had no qualms about the min­ute’s argu­ments, which I thought were quite sound and well-reasoned. But I seri­ous­ly won­dered who the audi­ence was sup­posed to be. Did the Friends approv­ing the minute real­ly think this was going to go up the chain of com­mand to to upper ech­e­lons of the Pen­ta­gon, the House Com­mit­tee on Defense, etc? “Gen­er­al, sir, we have a minute from some Quak­ers you must read right away!”

I’ve writ­ten polit­i­cal blogs and I like ana­lyz­ing poli­cies. I can make informed sec­u­lar argu­ments about cli­mate change and mil­i­tarism. Stay­ing on top of sci­en­tif­ic changes and under­stand­ing the effects of gov­ern­men­tal poli­cies is impor­tant for us. But it’s not the source of our col­lec­tive pow­er as Friends. Peo­ple look to us for our moral clar­i­ty, which (when we actu­al­ly pos­sess it) is a result of our spir­i­tu­al ground­ing. Mis­siles are wrong because threat­en­ing to kill peo­ple is wrong. Design­ing weapons capa­ble of war crimes is wrong because mass mur­der is wrong. These are sim­ple state­ments. They are sure to be con­sid­ered naive by those who only think of poli­cies. But they can speak to oth­ers (“speak to that of God in them”) who can feel their truth in their heart.

High school Quaker writing workshop

November 9, 2020
· Martin Kelley

Friends Jour­nal’s Stu­dent Voic­es Project is up to its eighth year. This year FGC is co-hosting an online writ­ing work­shop for Quak­er stu­dents want­i­ng to par­tic­i­pate. This is a real­ly cool oppor­tu­ni­ty. If you’re a Quak­er high school­er or know one, you can sign up here.

George Lakey on going out into the world

October 30, 2020
· Martin Kelley

A brand new video from Quak­er­S­peak inter­views George Lakey on the Choose Democ­ra­cy project.

There are many Friends involved in Choose Democ­ra­cy but it’s very con­scious­ly not a Quak­er orga­ni­za­tion (the word does­n’t even appear on its web­site). So it’s inter­est­ing to hear George share the way his faith and democ­ra­cy activism intersects:

I’m remind­ed of ear­ly Friends who loved to go to mar­ket squares on busy mar­ket­ing days and stand on a box or stand on some­thing, and preach the gospel as they under­stood it. And they attract­ed many peo­ple to become Quak­ers through doing that, includ­ing peo­ple who ini­tial­ly thought they were talk­ing rub­bish. So it’s that going out, it’s that not expect­ing peo­ple to come to us but instead tak­ing that offen­sive– it’s a mark of the growth of ear­ly Quak­erism and will be a mark of the growth of today’s Quak­erism if we’re will­ing to go out.