Tag Archives ⇒ books

The Religious SocieChildren of Prophets or Children of Propheticide?

February 19, 2019
· Martin Kelley

A stren­u­ous­ly and lengthi­ly argued dun­ci­a­tion of the fal­l­en­ness of mod­ern Friends, this piece is argued almost exclu­sive­ly from books. It’s inter­est­ing (and much of it is unde­ni­ably true) though the author seem unable to imag­ine thst there might be some sparks of authen­tic­i­ty and propheti­cism still burning.

The fol­low­ing post was writ­ten by Blake Everitt, a Friend the UK and mem­ber of the newly-formed Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Quak­ers. This essay explores the prophet­ic and apoc­a­lyp­tic nature of ear­ly Quak­erism, and sketch­es out how mid­dle class revi­sion­ism took over the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends. 

The Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends: Chil­dren of Prophets or Chil­dren of Propheticide?

In defense of Quaker media

January 3, 2019
· Martin Kelley

I gath­er that the Quak­er Face­book group is going through one of its reg­u­lar debates about iden­ti­ty and tone and mod­er­a­tion. The prob­lem is Face­book. It is the most direct com­peti­tor of Quaker-produced media. Its algo­rithms and mod­er­a­tor tools are not designed for the kind of con­sid­ered, inclu­sive, Spirit-led, and non-reactive dis­course that is Quak­er style at its ide­al (yes, we blow it our­selves con­stant­ly but hope­ful­ly keep striving).

I post­ed there tonight sug­gest­ing that Friends con­sid­er a media diet that includes more Quak­er media — books and mag­a­zines and blogs and videos and in-real-life dis­cus­sion oppor­tu­ni­ties. I wor­ry that if Face­book groups become the most vis­i­ble style of Quak­er dia­logue, then we will have lost some­thing tru­ly precious.

This mes­sage isn’t new to long­time read­ers of Quak­er­Ran­ter. I extolled blog­ging as a hedge against Face­bookjust yes­ter­day and in August I wrote about some of the dia­logue prob­lems inher­ent in the Face­book mod­el.

I’ve been fig­ur­ing out Face­book strate­gies for Quak­er media since it opened up to non-students cir­ca 2006. I appre­ci­ate much of the atten­tion it’s pro­vid­ed over the years. Social media like YouTube has also been a use­ful plat­form for things like the Quak­er­s­peak projectdespite own­er Google’s spot­ty track record. But it’s becom­ing hard to deny that social media has reshaped the style of civ­il dis­course and troll­ish hack­ery, most­ly for the worse. I think it’s real­ly essen­tial that we become more con­scious of the sources of our dai­ly media diet.

Mike Shell reviews book reviews

November 13, 2018
· Martin Kelley

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://​uni​ver​sal​ist​friends​.org/​w​e​b​l​o​g​/​t​h​r​e​e​-​b​o​o​k​s​-​f​o​r​-​w​h​i​t​e​-​p​e​o​ple

Skeletons (not even) in the closet

May 22, 2018
· Martin Kelley

This is a bit a gru­some sto­ry, though not as shock­ing at it should be. Louellen White, a researcher look­ing for bur­ial records of Native Amer­i­can chil­dren stum­bled on a Native Amer­i­can skull just sit­ting in a dis­play case of a old Philadel­phia meeting.

As White searched for grave­yard ledgers in the library — crammed with stuffed birds, cloth­ing, shells and books — she came upon the skull. Her legs wob­bled. And her stom­ach dropped. Arsenault-Cote offered advice and reas­sur­ance. “You’re out there look­ing for them, and now they’re show­ing them­selves to you,” she told White. “He’s been wait­ing a long time.” His­tor­i­cal­ly, Philadel­phia Quak­ers were “incon­sis­tent friends” to Indi­ans, engaged in the same col­o­niz­ing projects as oth­er faiths while see­ing them­selves as unique­ly able to edu­cate natives.

Incon­sis­tent is an apt word. Paula Palmer has been trac­ing the his­to­ry of Quak­er Indi­an Board­ing Schools: high-minded enter­pris­es that often for­ca­bly stripped her­itage from their pupils in ways that were as cul­tur­al­ly impe­r­i­al as they were unaware.

Byber­ry Meet­ing dates to the 1690s and the meet­ing­house grounds are full of abo­li­tion­ist his­to­ry. The skull was appar­ent­ly dug up in the mid-nineteenth cen­tu­ry as part of a near­by canal project and is thought to have come to the meet­ing­house as part of a col­lec­tion from a shut­tered his­tor­i­cal soci­ety. Its pres­ence on the shelf rep­re­sents the atti­tudes of Friends many decades ago who thought noth­ing of plac­ing a Lenape skull in a case. There’s also the sad sub­text that the meet­ing library is said to be so unused that most of the meet­ing’s con­tem­po­rary mem­bers had no idea it was there. It’s a shame that it took an out­side researcher to notice the skele­tons in our dis­play case.

https://​www​.philly​.com/​p​h​i​l​l​y​/​n​e​w​s​/​4​8​3​0​7​2​5​7​1​.​h​tml

British Quakers take long hard look at faith

May 7, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Britain Year­ly Meet­ing has decid­ed to under­take a once-in-a-generation rewrite of its Faith and Practice

Reg­u­lar revi­sion and being open to new truths is part of who Quak­ers are as a reli­gious soci­ety. Quak­ers com­piled the first of these books of dis­ci­pline in 1738. Since then, each new gen­er­a­tion of Quak­ers has revised the book. A new revi­sion may help it speak to younger Quak­ers and the wider world.

This pos­si­bil­i­ty of this revi­sion was the basis for the inac­cu­rate and overblown click­baity rhetoric last week that Quak­ers were giv­ing up God. Rewrit­ing these books of Faith and Prac­tice is not uncom­mon. But it can be a big fraught. Who decides what is archa­ic? Who decides which parts of our Quak­er expe­ri­ence are core and which are expend­able? Add to this the long­stand­ing Quak­er dis­trust of creedal state­ments and there’s a strong incen­tive to include every­body’s expe­ri­ence. Inclu­sion can be an admirable goal in life and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of course, but for a reli­gious body defin­ing itself it leads to lowest-common-denominationalism.

I’ve found it extreme­ly reward­ing to read old­er copies of Faith and Prac­tice pre­cise­ly because the sometimes-unfamiliar lan­guage opens up a spir­i­tu­al con­nec­tion that I’ve missed in the rou­tine of con­tem­po­rary life. The 1806 Philadel­phia Book of Dis­ci­pline has chal­lenged me to rec­on­cile its very dif­fer­ent take on Quak­er faith (where are the SPICES?) with my own. My under­stand­ing is that the first copies of Faith and Prac­tice were essen­tial­ly binders of the impor­tant min­utes that had been passed by Friends over the first cen­tu­ry of our exis­tence; these min­utes rep­re­sent­ed bound­aries – on our par­tic­i­pa­tion on war, on our lan­guage of days and times, on our advices against gam­bling and tav­erns. This was a very dif­fer­ent kind of doc­u­ment than our Faith and Prac­tice’s today.

It would be a per­son­al hell for me to sit on one of the rewrit­ing com­mit­tees. I like the mar­gins and fringes of Quak­er spir­i­tu­al­i­ty too much. I like peo­ple who have tak­en the time to think through their expe­ri­ences and give words to it – phras­es and ideas which might not fit the stan­dard nomen­cla­ture. I like pub­lish­ing and shar­ing the ideas of peo­ple who don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly agree.

These days more new­com­ers first find Friends through Wikipedia and YouTube and (often phe­nom­e­nal­ly inac­cu­rate) online dis­cus­sions. A few years ago I sat in a ses­sion of Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing in which we were dis­cus­sion revis­ing the sec­tion of Faith and Prac­tice that had to do with month­ly meet­ing report­ing. I was a bit sur­prised that the Friends who rose to speak on the pro­posed new pro­ce­dure all admit­ted being unaware of the process in the cur­rent edi­tion. It seems as if Faith and Prac­tice is often a impre­cise snap­shot of Quak­er insti­tu­tion­al life even to those of us who are deeply embedded.


Quakers take long hard look at faith

Quak­ers take long hard look at faith 

Quak­ers in Britain are to rewrite their book of dis­ci­pline that has guid­ed their work and wit­ness across…

Quakers Quakers 

Cast out by the Quakers, Abington’s abolitionist dwarf finally has his day

April 19, 2018
· Martin Kelley

A nice sto­ry on the belat­ed recog­ni­tion being giv­en abo­li­tion­ist stal­wart and polit­i­cal prankster Ben­jamin Lay up at Abing­ton Meet­ing in Penn­syl­va­nia (my first meeting!):

About 12 years ago, the Abing­ton meet­ing­house care­tak­er, Dave Wer­mel­ing, found an old sketch of Lay in a box. A short biog­ra­phy on worn brown paper was glued to back of the draw­ing. “I thought, ‘Who is this, and how can you not be talk­ing about him?’” Wer­mel­ing recalled.

I’ve long admired the sto­ry of Ben­jamin Lay. I’m not sure that the gen­er­al pub­lic read­ing these arti­cles is quite real­iz­ing that Quak­er dis­own­ment wasn’t a full shun­ning. As far as I know he con­tin­ued to be influ­en­tial with Quak­ers, for his pas­sion if not his strat­e­gy. Lay went far, far ahead of the Quak­ers of the time. His stunts were awe­some, but drench­ing year­ly meet­ing atten­ders with pig blood and pub­lish­ing books with­out per­mis­sion was going to get you unin­vit­ed from for­mal deci­sion mak­ing meetings.

I would very much hope that if any of us mod­erns were trans­port­ed back to that era, we would find the con­di­tions of human bondage so out­ra­geous that we would all go full Ben­jamin Lay: dis­rupt meet­ings, shat­ter norms, get dis­owned by our reli­gious bod­ies. If you read the his­to­ry of eighteen-century Quak­er activism in the Philadel­phia area you’ll see there were many tracts start­ing in the ear­li­est years of the Quak­er colonies. There were lots of Quak­ers who felt slav­ery was moral­ly wrong. But few felt the empow­er­ment to break from social con­ven­tions the way Lay did. But that’s kind of the nature of prophe­cy. I would be sus­pi­cious of any can­di­date for prophet that is liked by the admin­is­tra­tive bod­ies of their time. What kind of com­pla­cen­cy are we demon­strat­ing by our inac­tions today?

https://​www​.philly​.com/​p​h​i​l​l​y​/​n​e​w​s​/​q​u​a​k​e​r​s​-​b​e​n​j​a​m​i​n​-​l​a​y​-​d​w​a​r​f​-​a​b​o​l​i​t​i​o​n​i​s​t​-​s​l​a​v​e​r​y​-​a​b​i​n​g​t​o​n​-​f​r​i​e​n​d​s​-​m​e​e​t​i​n​g​-​2​0​1​8​0​4​1​9​.​h​t​m​l​?​m​o​b​i​=​t​rue

Review of Traditional Quaker Christianity

April 5, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Patri­cia Dall­mann reviews a 2004 book by Friends of Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing, Tra­di­tion­al Quak­er Chris­tian­i­ty:

Though Tra­di­tion­al Quak­er Chris­tian­i­ty is intend­ed to con­vey the tra­di­tion among Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends, it may find read­ers among Lib­er­als and Evan­gel­i­cals. Should anoth­er gen­er­a­tion of Quak­ers come forth and under­take the restora­tion of “the des­o­la­tions of many gen­er­a­tions,” they could find this book a resource for build­ing up a Quak­er Chris­t­ian society.

I must admit that after spend­ing my work days read­ing man­u­scripts and my com­mutes read­ing blog posts, the enjoy­ment of books has got­ten a bit squeezed out. This looks like a use­ful one to try to fit it. Friend Mar­ty Grundy reviewed this title for Friends Jour­nal a few years ago. After post­ing the link to Patri­ci­a’s post, Macken­zie remind­ed me that Quak­er Faith and Pod­cast has also been going through the book in recent episodes.

https://​patradall​mann​.word​press​.com/​2​0​1​8​/​0​4​/​0​5​/​r​e​v​i​e​w​-​o​f​-​t​r​a​d​i​t​i​o​n​a​l​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​-​c​h​r​i​s​t​i​a​n​i​ty/

Is our Quaker Peace Testimony an historical artifact or a living witness to our faith?

March 14, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Is our Quak­er Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny an his­tor­i­cal arti­fact or a liv­ing wit­ness to our faith?

If we aren’t liv­ing our faith, then the 1660 Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny is sim­ply an his­tor­i­cal arti­fact. Like the old musty books in our Meet­ing library that sit behind glass, most­ly unread. They look impres­sive and make us feel good about our­selves, but if we don’t read them and take the words to heart, they might as well be wall paper.