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)

Quakerly competition?

February 13, 2019
· Martin Kelley

A quick update that we at Friends Jour­nal have extend­ed the dead­line for an upcom­ing issue on Friends and com­pe­ti­tion. It’s a real­ly inter­est­ing top­ic and I’d like to see some more arti­cles to choose from. In my “Edi­tor’s Desk” post try­ing to drum up writ­ing inter­est, I dug through the FJ archives to find pre­vi­ous dis­cus­sions on the top­ic. I’ll excerpt a few here:

If you look back through Friends Jour­nal archives, you’ll find warn­ings against com­pet­i­tive behav­ior. In 1955 Bess B. Lane of Swarth­more (Pa.) Meet­ing wrote that schools should “Place empha­sis on coop­er­a­tion, shar­ing, rather than on com­pe­ti­tion” and won­dered if “com­pe­ti­tion is being over­stressed in our schools.” In 1972, Christo­pher H. Ander­son, then a senior at Wilm­ing­ton Col­lege, had stronger words. He con­trast­ed his Quak­er edu­ca­tion with pub­lic schools, which he said “breed a social con­for­mi­ty, an intel­lec­tu­al bland­ness and a repug­nant spir­it of competition.”

If you know any­one who is inter­est­ed in the top­ic, please for­ward this along!


Friendly Competition? Writing deadline extended to Feb 25

Friend­ly Com­pe­ti­tion? Writ­ing dead­line extend­ed to Feb 25 

Learn more about writ­ing for our May issue on competition.

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Belonging and difference

February 13, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Gil S on con­ti­nu­ity and change:

Many of us find dif­fi­cul­ty in fac­ing change. The way a meet­ing house is arranged and the way Quak­er faith is expressed have both changed over time. There have always been those who find it dif­fi­cult if not impos­si­ble to let go of what has gone before. In my local meet­ing I always sit in the same place and acknowl­edge that I find change dif­fi­cult, but in spite of this there are ways in which I have changed. 

I sus­pect part of thr con­text of this is the hopes and fears of British Friends as they embark on a reci­sion of their book of Faith and Prac­tice. An edit­ing group has recent­ly been named.

https://​stum​bling​step​ping​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​1​9​/​0​2​/​b​e​l​o​n​g​i​n​g​-​a​n​d​-​d​i​f​f​e​r​e​n​c​e​.​h​tml

A 12-step program for world peace

February 12, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Bob Dock­horn, my pre­de­ces­sor as Friends Jour­nal senior edi­tor, has been doing a lot of writ­ing since he’s retired and one of his big projects involves a vision of a world free of its addic­tion to vio­lence. Some­where in the process he lost a step (there’s only 11).

Hav­ing been raised a Friend, I assume a hope­ful stance toward the future. Unlike many oth­ers, we gen­er­al­ly pre­sume that the human world is not meant to be adver­sar­i­al. Even deci­sion mak­ing by vot­ing is reject­ed among Friends as unnec­es­sar­i­ly con­fronta­tion­al. Friends par­tic­i­pate in local and nation­al elec­tions, but often with mis­giv­ings since these con­tests, law­mak­ing, and even courts can be set­tings in which priv­i­lege is pre­served and fought for.

One evening a few years ago, as I sat in silence at Southamp­ton (Pa.) Meet­ing, my atten­tion turned to a 12-Step poster on the wall, left behind by a Nar­cotics Anony­mous group that meets week­ly in our space. As I stared at it, I expe­ri­enced a flash of insight — that our entire cul­ture is addict­ed to com­pe­ti­tion and violence. 

I appre­ci­ate how the steps start sim­ply (“Clear One’s Pre­sump­tions,” “Access Mul­ti­ple Sources of Infor­ma­tion”) and then build into pro­pos­als that seem pie-in-the-sky “(Trans­form Mil­i­tary Insti­tu­tions,” “Imple­ment World Gov­ern­ment”), espe­cial­ly with cur­rent world trends. But that’s the nature of a jour­ney: it starts with steps but main­tains vision toward a destination.


Eleven Steps toward an Enduring World

Eleven Steps toward an Endur­ing World 

A fierce­ly ide­al­is­tic vision of a human­i­ty cured of its addic­tion to vio­lence and war.

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Brian Drayton: One cost of our theological diversity

February 11, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Respond­ing to arti­cles in the Decem­ber Friends Journal:

Rather I am aware that a cer­tain lev­el of fel­low­ship or com­pan­ion­ship is miss­ing. It can take a life­time, I find, to explore the impli­ca­tions and mean­ing of the gospel life, to expe­ri­ence such a renew­ing of the mind that one can grow into the life of Christ, see and learn to hon­or the Sophia of God, the Logos in its appear­ing in humans, and in cre­ation, and in our­selves in our mea­sure. Fel­low­ship with oth­ers who are fol­low­ing that same path ( a path “tra­di­tion­al­ly held by Friends”) is nour­ish­ing, stim­u­lat­ing, and educa­tive in, well, par­tic­u­lar ways. Fel­low­ship with earnest seek­ers who under­stand their paths dif­fer­ent­ly is also pre­cious, and indeed nec­es­sary — but not the same. 

One cost of our the­o­log­i­cal diversity

A what-if

February 10, 2019
· Martin Kelley

An alter­na­tive his­to­ry star­ring John Woolman

That might have gone dif­fer­ent­ly if White­field had encoun­tered some­one like Wool­man — some­one whose imag­i­na­tion was shaped by the gospel and the Gold­en Rule rather than the brute banal­i­ty of Whitefield’s actu­al, real-world scheme. 

An alter­nate his­to­ry and an alter­nate future

Evangelistic malpractice

February 8, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Johan Mau­r­er on start­ing fresh in a cor­ner of the Quak­er world:

I was grate­ful that the “who” ques­tion was there — tes­ti­fy­ing that we are not cen­tered on our­selves, duti­ful­ly inven­to­ry­ing our Quak­er mark­ers. For me, evan­ge­lism (pay­ing urgent atten­tion to the “who”) puts all those oth­er tes­ti­monies in per­spec­tive. All those tes­ti­monies are “signs and won­ders,” qual­i­ties of the Light by which we as the Body of Christ par­tic­i­pate in mak­ing Jesus visible. 

https://​blog​.canyoube​lieve​.me/​2​0​1​9​/​0​2​/​e​v​a​n​g​e​l​i​s​t​i​c​-​m​a​l​p​r​a​c​t​i​c​e​.​h​tml

Keeping cradle Quakers

February 8, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Rhi­an­non Grant asks: what’s the oppo­site of a Rumspringa?

So my ques­tions for Quak­ers are: How do you ensure that adults are trust­ed to be adults even if they are under 30? How do you make sure that peo­ple are giv­en oppor­tu­ni­ties to take respon­si­bil­i­ty with­out feel­ing that they must per­form espe­cial­ly well because they are rep­re­sent­ing a whole demographic? 

Here in the U.S., the trick to get­ting on nation­al com­mit­tees while young (at least when I was try­ing it in my 20s) was hav­ing a well-known mom. As some­one who kept knock­ing and kept get­ting turned away it blew me away when I heard Quaker-famous off­spring com­plain how they were always being asked to serve on com­mit­tees. But then I real­ized it was the same tok­eniz­ing phe­nom­e­non, just in reverse.

So our work isn’t just look­ing around a room and tick­ing off demo­graph­ic box­es, but real­ly dig­ging deep­er and see­ing if we’re rep­re­sen­ta­tive of multi-dimensional diver­si­ties. And if we’re not, the prob­lem isn’t just that we aren’t diverse (diver­si­ty is a fine val­ue in and of itself but ulti­mate­ly just a crude tool) but that we have unex­am­ined cul­tur­al prac­tices and selec­tion sys­tems that are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly turn­ing away peo­ple from com­mu­ni­ty par­tic­i­pa­tion and service.

Keep­ing cra­dle Quak­ers by mak­ing room to lean in?

Poking pigs?

February 6, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Bucks Coun­ty, Pa., Friend Nor­val Reece has a piece on fake and real news, with a great line from his mother:

Polls and ana­lysts con­firm a grow­ing trend for peo­ple to tune in almost exclu­sive­ly to those news sources which rein­force their own opin­ions and con­demn the oth­ers — regard­less of qual­i­ty, the use of facts, opin­ion, bias, and mis­in­for­ma­tion. Experts call this “source bias.” My straight-talking Quak­er moth­er referred to it as “peo­ple try­ing to sell you a pig in a poke” — peo­ple try­ing to con­vince you of a point of view by giv­ing you lim­it­ed or false infor­ma­tion, try­ing to sell you a pig in a bag when you can’t see it or exam­ine it. Com­mu­nist coun­tries and dic­ta­tor­ships are mas­ters at this. 

https://​www​.buckscoun​ty​couri​er​times​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​2​0​1​9​0​2​0​3​/​f​a​i​t​h​-​f​r​e​e​d​o​m​-​o​f​-​p​r​e​s​s​-​e​s​s​e​n​t​i​a​l​-​t​o​-​d​e​m​o​c​r​acy