The bully, the Friend and the Christian

April 21, 2006

Lazy guy I am, I’m going to cut-and-paste a com­ment I left over at Rich the Brook­lyn Quak­er’s blog in response to his post “What This Chris­t­ian Is Look­ing For In Quakerism”:http://brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-this-christian-is-looking-for-in.html. There’s been quite a good dis­cus­sion in the com­ments. In them Rich pos­es this analogy:
bq. Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion and World War II, I have been told that Franklin Roo­sevelt ral­lied the spir­its of the Amer­i­can peo­ple with his “fire­side chats”. These radio broad­casts com­mu­ni­cat­ed infor­ma­tion, pro­ject­ed hope, and called for spe­cif­ic respons­es from his lis­ten­ers; includ­ing some acts of self-sacrifice and unselfish­ness… Often peo­ple would gath­er in small groups around their radios to hear these broad­casts, they would talk about what Roo­sevelt had said, and to some extent they were guid­ed in their dai­ly lives by some of what they had heard.

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Giuseppe Beppe: Il podcast della famiglia

February 24, 2006

Sor­ry for the qui­et on the blog front. I’ve been busy, busy. My Sec­ond Month has seen an FGC com­mit­tee meet­ing in Greens­boro, the “Food for Fire” Pow­ell House week­end and a dead­line for the Gath­er­ing Advance Pro­gram. I’m sure I’ll be more talk­a­tive soon, promise promise.

In the mean­time, I’m online in anoth­er realm. Mia Con­siglieri Joe G inter­viewed me for Beppe­pod­cast #24: “Mar­tin Kel­ley, Quak­er Blog Father”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/beppepodcast-24-martin-kelley-quaker.html (“sub­scrip­tion here”:http://beppe.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=62209). Molto buon, il mio figlio. Bel­lo! Bello!

Random updates

December 22, 2005

Just a quick note to every­one that I haven’t post­ed more late­ly. It’s a busy time of the year. I’ve had my hands full keep­ing up with arti­cles and links to the “Chris­t­ian Peacemakers”:/quaker/cpt.
I’ve also been doing some free­lance sites. One is launched: “Quakersong.org”:www.quakersong.org, the new online home of Annie Pat­ter­son and Peter Blood of _Rise Up Singing_ fame. It’s just the start to what should soon be an inter­est­ing site.
Geek-wise I’ve been inter­est­ed in the Web 2.0 stuff (see “this Best Of list of sites”:http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm, link cour­tesy “C Wess Daniels”:http://gatheringinlight.blogspot.com/). I’ve talked about some of this “back in June”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/i_dont_have_anything_to_say_either.php but it’s get­ting more excit­ing. In the Fall I was asked to sub­mit a pro­pos­al for redo­ing the web­site of a Quak­er con­fer­ence cen­ter near Philadel­phia and it was all Web 2.0‑centric – maybe too much so as I did­n’t get the job! I’ll post an edit­ed ver­sion of the pro­pos­al soon for the geeks out there. Some of the new tech stuff will under­gird a fab­u­lous new “Quakerfinder.org”:www.quakerfinder.org fea­ture that will allow iso­lat­ed Friends to con­nect to form new wor­ship groups (to launch soon) and even more is behind the dreams of a new “Quakerbooks.org”:www.quakerbooks.org site.
In the mean­time, I encour­age every­one to order “On Liv­ing with a Con­cern for Gospel Ministry”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/1 – 888305-38‑x, the new book by New Eng­land Year­ly Meet­ing’s Bri­an Dray­ton (it arrived from the print­ers yes­ter­day). It’s being billed as a mod­ern day ver­sion of “A Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions” and if it lives up the hype it should be an impor­tant book for the stir­rings of deep­en­ing faith­ful­ness we’ve been see­ing among Quak­ers late­ly. While you’re wait­ing for the book to arrive in your mail­box, check out Brook­lyn Rich’s “Test­ing Leadings”:http://brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2005/12/testing-leadings-part‑1.html post.

Live Web Coverage from FGC (not)

July 3, 2005

23028940_2a342308d2Over on Beppe­blog Joe dreams of dai­ly web cov­er­age of the FGC Gath­er­ing [Update: link long dead]. Well, FGC’s not pay­ing its web­mas­ter (me, for now) for such ser­vice but I’ll try to sneak in a few posts between book­store cus­tomers. The book­store set-up was remark­ably easy. There was no truck cri­sis, no com­put­er cri­sis, no get­ting lost on highways.

As reg­u­lar read­ers will know, I’m lead­ing a work­shop called “Strangers to the Covenant” with Zachary Moon and this morn­ing was the first work­shop. Although it was billed as a work­shop for high school stu­dents and adult young Friend (so 15 – 35 years old), though almost all of the par­tic­i­pants are high school­ers (what does that mean?). It seems like a great bunch. I arrived about fif­teen min­utes ear­ly to cen­ter in wor­ship; two of the atten­ders came in the room and sat with me and one by one every­one came in and joined the wor­ship. I had to won­der if a group of old­er Friends would have been able to resist the temp­ta­tion to ask about each oth­er’s jew­el­ry, com­plain about the air con­di­tion­ing, etc.

Julie reports that the cafe­te­ria food is good. We’ve also been hap­py patrons of Gillie’s and Bol­lo’s Cafe.

On the Web: Where’s that Power of the Lord?

June 16, 2005

The new Quak­er Life has an arti­cle by Charles W. Heav­ilin ask­ing “Where’s the Pow­er of the Lord Now?”:http://www.fum.org/QL/issues/0506/heaviland.htm
bq. In our post­mod­ern, frag­ment­ed world, where now is the pow­er of the Lord among Quak­ers? There is a vast divide between the accounts of ear­ly Friends and that of con­tem­po­rary Friends. Most mod­ern Quak­er report­ing is per­func­to­ry — accounts with the spir­i­tu­al qual­i­ty of recipes in a cook­book. Con­ver­sa­tions at Quak­er gath­er­ings now revolve around declin­ing atten­dance or bleak assess­ments of the spir­i­tu­al shal­low­ness of soci­ety. Sel­dom, if ever, is there any men­tion of the pow­er of the Lord.
Great stuff. He gets into the way our cul­ture has neg­a­tive­ly influ­enced Friends. After you read it check out “C Wess Daniel’s”:http://gatheringinlight.blogspot.com/2005/06/i‑appreciate-article-charles-has.html com­men­tary on the article:
bq. Sim­ply put, I think we need to learn the sto­ries of the Quak­er church once again, and begin to tell them, live them, and move for­ward in this tra­di­tion that has been past down to us as one that has been formed by the Spir­it of Christ through such won­der­ful lead­ers as Fox, Fell, Bar­clay, Wool­man, etc.

I don’t have anything to say (either)

June 3, 2005
Some Quaker Bloggers

Sum­mer vis­i­ta­tions got an ear­ly start last month when the North­east US “Quak­er blogroll”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/Quaker_places.php con­verged in my back yard with no agen­da to fol­low and no epis­tle to write.Front row: “James”:http://curiouspenn.blogspot.com/, “Jeffrey”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000588.php and vis­i­ta­tion ring­leader “Amanda”:http://ofthebest.blogspot.com/. Back: “Ryan”:http://snorkelinglight.blogspot.com/, “Rob”:http://consider-the-lilies.blogspot.com/, “Me”:/martink, “Theo”:/theo and poor blog­less Christina.

Well since Kwak­er­saur is inau­gu­rat­ing the “I don’t have any­thing to post”:http://kwakersaur.blogspot.com/2005/06/i‑dont-have-anything-to-say.html meme, I’ll chime in that I don’t either. Actu­al­ly I’ve writ­ten two and half essays but real­ized they’re both real­ly for myself. This is how it hap­pens some­times. I’ve long noticed this phe­nom­e­non in fully-formed ver­bal min­istry that I know I’m not sup­posed to deliv­er and it feels as if such restraint is some­times healthy on the blog. The mes­sage will reap­pear in oth­er forums I’m sure, most like­ly next mon­th’s “Gath­er­ing workshop”:www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/strangers with Zachary Moon.
In the mean­time, there’s been fresh talk about plain lan­guage and dress this week by “Johan Maurer”:http://maurers.home.mindspring.com/2005/06/plain-language.htm, “Claire Reddy”:http://Quakerspeak.blogspot.com/2005/06/simplicity-unfocused-thought-blurt.html and the “Live­jour­nal Quakers”:http://www.livejournal.com/community/Quakers/105292.html. Russ Nel­son’s start­ed a “Plan­et Quaker”:http://planet.Quaker.org/ blog aggre­ga­tor (which includes Quak­er Ranter: thanks!). LizOpp talked about “field testing”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2005/05/after-annual-sessions.html her upcom­ing “Quak­er iden­ti­ty Gath­er­ing workshop”:http://www.fgcquaker.org/gathering/workshops/work36.php at North­ern Year­ly Meet­ing ses­sions and Kiara’s talked about “being field test­ed by Liz at this year’s NYM sessions”:http://wordspinning.blogspot.com/2005/05/northern-yearly-meeting.html (how cool is that?!).
I’ve been geek­ing out on “Del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/martin_kelley, the “social book­mark­ing” sys­tem and on the eso­teric con­cepts of “tags”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags, the “seman­tic web”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web and “folksonomies”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy. Two weeks ago I would have laughed at these neol­o­gisms but I’m begin­ning to see that there’s some­thing in all this. The only out­ward form the reg­u­lars will see is a more accu­rate “Relat­ed Entries” selec­tion at the bot­tom of posts (thanks to “Adam Kalsey”:http://kalsey.com/blog/2003/05/related_entries_revisited/) and bet­ter vis­i­bil­i­ty in “select­ed Tech­no­rati entries”:http://www.technorati.com/tag/Quaker (which will get less me-centric as I fin­ish tag­ging my own back posts).
blankAnd of course we’re till­ing the field, plant­i­ng a gar­den, putting up laun­dry lines and oth­er­wise thor­ough­ly enjoy­ing the first Spring in our new house. It’s bed­time, off to read the rad­i­cal­ly folk­so­nom­ic adven­tures of Sam and “My Car”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060560452 (it’s pure tags: “My name is Sam.” “This is my car.” “I love my car.” I’d wor­ry that not-so-baby Theo is get­ting too excit­ed by com­bu­sion engines if he weren’t even more excit­ed by “dia-di-calschht” aka the “bicy­cle” Papa rides off to work on.)

Net Sightings

May 2, 2005

The Pub­lic Quak­er writ­ing about prayer
bq. Prayer is one con­stant thing for me, a reli­able base. When am I hav­ing epis­te­mo­log­i­cal doubt about every­thing, I do know that is good for me to pray.
A month ago LizOpp post­ed a inter­est “FAQ on her wor­ship group”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2005/03/faqs-about-my-worship-group.html which is well worth read­ing. Last week she fol­lowed it up with a very chew-worthy post on “The­o­log­i­cal uni­ty and spir­i­tu­al diversity”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2005/04/theological-unity-and-spiritual.html (which adds new ground to the ter­ri­to­ry we’ve been explor­ing here on Quak­er Ranter on “Non-Theism”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000567.php and “Lov­ing God”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000577.php).
“Quakerspeak”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/Quakerspeak/ is the new blog by a high-school Friend I met last week in Ore­gon. Whew, is she on fire!:
bq. I nev­er real­ly thought much about how I was sort of bot­tling up all my the­o­log­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al con­tem­pla­tions; sud­den­ly I feel like I’m pour­ing it all out on the table and exam­in­ing it all.. well, except that I’ve been exam­in­ing it all. I’m try­ing to bet­ter apply my spritu­al­i­ty to my dai­ly life and inter­ac­tions with­out los­ing sight of myself; I’m try­ing to fig­ure out where it all fits into my own life with­out try­ing to alter my per­son­al­i­ty or ways of being.
Beppe’s just start­ed a new series with a post, “The Trou­bles with Friends Part 1”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2005/05/trouble-with-friends-1-too-much-of.html. This first install­ment focus­es on our fear of judge­men­tal­ism. Speak on, bro!

QuaCarol: You Don’t Want to Be Ranters Anymore

March 11, 2005

By QuaC­arol
Some­times I have to lift up com­ments and make them their own posts. Here’s one of QuaC­arol’s reply to “Uh-Oh: Beppe’s Doubts”:/martink/archives/000544.php: “I see this com­mu­ni­ty of blog­gers, reach­ing out to each oth­er and con­nect­ing, when meet­ings (and here I ven­ture to say “all”) are focused on keep­ing their pam­phlet racks filled, rather than post­ing URLs on their bul­letin boards or cre­at­ing a newcomer’s URL handout.”

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