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)
Two much-discussed threads on /reddit/Quakers, the first pondering Quakerism with Jesus, and the second — a response—arguing for Jesus’s centrality. Both original posts are perhaps a bit predictable but the conversations go into interesting contradictions and dilemmas.
Also, an early plug that the December Friends Journal will focus on Quakers and Christianity.
At an 80th anniversary of the UK kindertransport program (which we read about a few days ago), survivors and Friends call for wider support for today’s refugees and asylum seekers:
Helen Drewery, Head of Witness and Worship for Quakers in Britain, welcoming all to Friends House, said, “We are pleased to be hosting an event which honours all those – including Quakers who put the Kindertransport into effect. Their endeavours are being echoed today by nearly 100 Quaker meetings across Britain which have identified themselves as Sanctuary Meetings and are supporting people who have fled from danger in their home countries. We are glad that these Meetings and the people they are supporting are represented at today’s event. We join them in pressing for more safe passages.”
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/27200
This story needs no clever introduction:
“We wanted our guests to have something to do as they arrived [while] we took pictures with our families, so we planned a kitten hour,” Colleen told POPSUGAR. “We did a cocktail hour with cocktails named after our cats for the reception, but the Quaker meeting house we used for the ceremony doesn’t allow alcohol on premises. I wanted a wedding falcon, but Iz vetoed that, and so we compromised on kittens.”
https://www.popsugar.com/moms/Couple-Has-Kitten-Hour-Wedding-45498151/amp
Quaker refugee work circa 1933:
The reports gathered from the Jewish community in Germany by Quakers were of influence when Quakers accompanied the Jewish delegation who went to see Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare to plead the case for allowing immigration of children into Britain without the usual visa restrictions. They swayed the government and this planned immigration of German and Austrian Jewish children became known as the Kindertransport. Around 10,000 children were evacuated from Germany and Austria to Britain between 1938 and 1939.
What I find most fascinating is the detail that the Friends library in London doesnt have a lot of records of this work. It was so much in line with other refugee assistance Friends were doing in Europe that they evidently considered it just another day on the job, so to speak. I shared a piece on the related Quakerspeisungen a few days ago.
Okay, it’s not quite so referential: Mike’s lifting up three books in September’s Friends Journal book columns that “help ‘white’ readers go deeper into self-awareness about the hidden dynamics of racism.” He also tells a little of his own story of color-blindness.
When my “white” friends said I couldn’t bring my “black” best friend to their lunch table, I shrugged and sat with him at a “black” table. On the minus side, when someone in the school parking lot shouted nigger lover, and my friend wanted to fight, I just told him I didn’t mind the insult. That was probably my first seriously hurtful act of “white color-blindness.” It took me decades to realize, to my shame, that it was he who was being insulted, not me.
https://universalistfriends.org/weblog/three-books-for-white-people
This week marks the hundred-year anniversary of the end of the “Great War,” World War I, branded as the war to end all wars. Our annual commemoration of the armistice in the U.S. largely went by the wayside in 1954 when Congress changed the name from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. Instead of marking the end of a horrific war that literally consumed much of European resources and people for years in trenches that never moved, we now spend the day filling lectures with cliches of military service.
But the hundred year anniversary also means we can start remembering the aftermath of the war. The First World War set up the second. We largely think of the mistakes and half-efforts of the victorious powers but Quakers were part of more righteous storyline:
Even more food was sent by American Quakers under the leadership of Herbert Hoover, providing daily meals for 60,0000 starving Berliners for five years. The Germans labelled this massive effort, Quakerspeisungen: “Quaker Feedings.” It saved thousands of lives, including those of the family of Oscar Schindler who famously went on to help 700 Jews to escape the gas chambers at Auschwitz in the Second World War. Schindler’s sisters spent six months recuperating with the Hall family and one even attended Thirsk Grammar School for a term.
Friends Journal Bonuses: Quaker work in Germany in the 1920s and 30s was the subject ofQuakers in Germany during and after the World Wars from 2010. Relief efforts in Spain were part of a more recent story that tied it to present-day refugee assistance in Gota de Leche.
https://www.darlingtonandstocktontimes.co.uk/news/17207689.heroic-quakers-and-a-fascinating-link-between-oscar-schindler-and-thirsk/?ref=twtrec
Back in March, Friends Journal and the Earlham School of Religion co-hosted an online discussion with six Quaker candidates for congressional seats. The idea and coordination came from the awesome Greg Woods. I went to see just how high the 2018 “gray wave” had crested.
Spoilers: no wave. Four of the candidates didn’t make it out of the primaries and a fifth was running as an independent in a long-shot candidacy. The one candidate to win major-party primary was the awesome Shawna Roberts1 of Barnesville, Ohio. Shawna’s one of the most down-to-earth, real, people I know and it was a lot of fun to follow her campaign. Her twitter feed has been a hoot:
Last night, at the BPW forum, my opponent’s statement said his childhood home “didn’t even have indoor plumbing.”
Oh, Bill. Indoor plumbing’s still pending at our old farm house.
You can’t out-hillbilly me. Unless you eat squirrel brains. I draw the line at squirrel brains. pic.twitter.com/hGMJvQ8Yhq— Shawna Roberts (@RobertsOhioD6) October 20, 2018
Unfortunately Shawna only got about 30 percent of the vote yesterday. This election was not kind to Democrats in rural districts like southeast Ohio’s 6 and she was running against an incumbent. From my vantage point 30 percent seems pretty good, though as my seventh grade math teacher used to intone in his weary baritone, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. 2 Still, the prospect of a Mrs Roberts Goes to Washington win had me hoping against the odds. I’d love to see her continue to be involved: 2020 is only two years away.
Stats on everyone’s results are at the updated Quakers in Politics page. For anyone wondering about Quaker politicians, Paul Buckley had a nice overview of our complicated relationship to voting a few years ago.
Let me give a plug that Friends Journal is looking for articles on the topic of “Outside the Meetinghouse” for the March issue. The deadline is a little over a month away. Here’s a little bit of my write-up for it, as a teaser:
There is a long history of Friends preaching and witnessing outside of the confines of the meetinghouse. George Fox’s Journal is full of unconventional worshiping; he had a particular penchant for preaching from any bit of high ground he could find, like a tree or rock outcropping. His contemporary James Naylor is most remembered for re-enacting Jesus’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem by dramatically riding a horse down a main road into Bristol. Modern-day Friends continue to find unconventional places to worship…
Also, I’ve just set up a form to get on the email notification list to get pinged when topic write-ups get posted. It’s very low-volume, as we only write these once a month. There’s only two subscribers. For the time being, I’m just keeping the emails in a list and sending personalized emails.
Friends Journal 