Tag Archives ⇒ didn

“We tried that back in 1937”

March 22, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Johan Mau­r­er tells the sto­ry of a Friends meet­ing that was able to turn engrained pat­terns and opaque deci­sion­mak­ing around:

I don’t want to exag­ger­ate the ease of the tran­si­tion. I remem­ber an elder­ly Friend who opposed a pro­pos­al to hold busi­ness meet­ings at anoth­er time than the Sun­day school hour. She argued — and I think this is near­ly ver­ba­tim — “We tried that back in 1937 and it did­n’t work.” As much as I want­ed to laugh out loud, I had to acknowl­edge that her entire his­to­ry at the meet­ing exem­pli­fied self­less service. 

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The gray wave that wasn’t

November 7, 2018
· Martin Kelley

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:

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.


2018 Quakers in Politics Web Panel (Updated Nov 2018)

2018 Quak­ers in Pol­i­tics Web Pan­el (Updat­ed Nov 2018) 

The upcom­ing U.S. Con­gres­sion­al mid-term elec­tions already have at least sev­en Quak­er can­di­dates for office. How does their…

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

NYC Friends school back in the spotlight in the NYTimes Magazine

September 6, 2018
· Martin Kelley

A deep dive into a con­tro­ver­sy more com­pli­cat­ed than it first appears, “A Teacher Made a Hitler Joke in the Class­room. It Tore the School Apart”:

At a meet­ing with admin­is­tra­tors about the inci­dent in late Feb­ru­ary, mem­bers of the high school’s Par­ents Asso­ci­a­tion said that keep­ing Frisch would send the mes­sage that the school didn’t take anti-Semitism seri­ous­ly. Anoth­er par­ent told Laud­er that this was not the first time Frisch had said or done some­thing inappropriate. 


A Teacher Made a Hitler Joke in the Classroom. It Tore the School Apart. (Published 2018)

A Teacher Made a Hitler Joke in the Class­room. It Tore the School Apart. (Pub­lished 2018) 

At Friends Sem­i­nary, an elite pri­vate school in Man­hat­tan, an awk­ward par­o­dy of a Nazi salute opened a…

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New Jersey Transit wastes our time again

August 20, 2018
· Martin Kelley

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I just came back from what was billed as a kind of hearing/information meet­ing on New Jer­sey Tran­sit’s planned shut­down of the Atlantic City Line. At least two of us had tak­en this seri­ous­ly enough that we had writ­ten 500-word state­ments (here’s mine) but as soon as I walked into the Atlantic City rail sta­tion this morn­ing at 8am, I real­ized that this was just a pro-forma, dis­or­ga­nized PR appearance.

The chief exec­u­tive of New Jer­sey Tran­sit, Kevin Cor­bett 3, was there telling us the same list of excus­es for the shut­down they’ve been telling us, name­ly, that this is about Pos­i­tive Train Con­trol (PTC) test­ing 4. At least I think he was. NJT appar­ent­ly does­n’t believe in micro­phones. I squeezed as close­ly as I could in the amor­phous crowd of maybe 100 pas­sen­gers who had turned up but I still could only make out a few words. Near­est Cor­bett were video cam­eras whose spot­lights lit up his face. Maybe I can watch the news tonight and hear the meet­ing that I drove forty min­utes to attend5.

I did hear repeat­ed invok­ing of “PTC” but no of those words were admis­sions or mea cul­pas about the long-simmering labor prob­lems that have led to train crew short­ages. Because NJ Tran­sit’s man­age­ment have been behind tar­gets for train­ing new crews, and because engi­neers have been leav­ing for better-paying jobs on Amtrak and Metro North, there aren’t enough crews to run all of its lines and also do PTC test­ing. The eas­i­est fix to the labor short­age is to just shut down the least polit­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed train line and rede­ploy its crews to NYC-bound trains. We’re told this is a tem­po­rary fix but what if the man­age­ment prob­lems hir­ing, train­ing, and retain­ing crews con­tin­ues to bot­tom out?

After half an hour of this, Tran­sit police found portable line mark­ers so that pas­sen­gers could line up to talk to Cor­bett. There were many pas­sen­gers I rec­og­nized from my 15 years of com­mut­ing this line and I stood try­ing to hear them but again, to no avail. It was clear he was just giv­ing the line.

Near­by was a table with sched­ules. I was pret­ty unhap­py but I asked them a spe­cif­ic ques­tion 6. At least the Tran­sit employ­ee said she did­n’t know and would look into it. She even wrote “Far­ley” on a pad of paper. I guess my trip was­n’t total­ly wasted.

If you’re a South Jer­sey local affect­ed by all this, there’s a peti­tion to sign. My friend Joseph (bicy­cleri­i­ights on Twit­ter) has also done a great job writ­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of vision­ary South Jer­sey tran­sit reform. Update: Also, Nore­ast­er­N­ick did a much bet­ter job get­ting to the front of the line and chal­leng­ing Cor­bett. His video is great.

Creativity and the Arts

June 1, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Hap­py first of the month. The new issue of Friends Jour­nal is up and it’s a great one: Cre­ativ­i­ty and the Arts. This is actu­al­ly the first issue on the arts since the mag­a­zine went to col­or in 2013. Here’s a bit of the intro­duc­to­ry Among Friends col­umn writ­ten by yours tru­ly:

This overt dis­trust of the arts fad­ed away a long time ago. Today, the sheer vol­ume of cre­ativ­i­ty among Friends is impres­sive. When we put out a call for this issue, we had far more sub­mis­sions than we could pos­si­bly print. A dozen more artists told us they would love to write some­thing but were too busy cre­at­ing to do so at this time. Faced with a bit of a dilem­ma, we’ve cre­at­ed a sam­pler: each of the arti­cles in these pages rep­re­sents a dif­fer­ent facet of cre­ativ­i­ty among Friends.

Through­out the diverse dis­ci­plines of visu­al arts, music, writ­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, community-based art, and per­for­mance art, a com­mon thread harks back to the con­cerns of those ear­li­er Friends: there’s still a con­sci­en­tious­ness around art.

I’ll talk more about indi­vid­ual arti­cles as we fea­ture them but in the mean­time, feel free to leave me your ini­tial thoughts in the com­ments below. Bummed that you did­n’t write any­thing? The issue on Meet­ings and Mon­ey is look­ing for sub­mis­sions.


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Page not found — Friends Journal 

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Ask Me Anything: Do Quakers celebrate Easter and if so, how?

March 26, 2018
· Martin Kelley

A ques­tion From Jes­si­ca F about Friends and Easter.

On the face of it, this is an easy ques­tion. Ear­ly Friends were loath to rec­og­nize any litur­gi­cal prac­tices and they were lower‑p puri­tan­i­cal about any­thing that smacked of pagan­ism. Famous­ly, they didn’t use the com­mon names of the week or months because many of them referred to non-Christian deities, like Thor and Janus.

They were espe­cial­ly grumpy about any­thing that smacked of latter-day syn­cretism. Many of the church hol­i­days were seen as pagan fes­ti­vals with a super­fi­cial Chris­t­ian over­lay. I’ll be the first to admit they could get kind of obnox­ious this way. Wikipedia explains some of this attitude:

Oth­er Protes­tant groups took a dif­fer­ent atti­tude, with most Anabap­tists, Quak­ers, Con­gre­ga­tion­al­ists and Pres­by­ter­ian Puri­tans regard­ing such fes­ti­vals as an abom­i­na­tion. The Puri­tan rejec­tion of East­er tra­di­tions was (and is) based part­ly upon their inter­pre­ta­tion of 2 Corinthi­ans 6:14 – 16 and part­ly upon a more gen­er­al belief that, if a reli­gious prac­tice or cel­e­bra­tion is not actu­al­ly writ­ten in the Chris­t­ian Bible, then that practice/celebration must be a lat­er devel­op­ment and can­not be con­sid­ered an authen­tic part of Chris­t­ian prac­tice or belief — so at best sim­ply unnec­es­sary, at worst actu­al­ly sinful.

In Latin, East­er is called Pascha, a ref­er­ence to the Jew­ish Passover fes­ti­val. But in Eng­land, Pascha took place in the month the old Eng­lish called Ēostre after a god­dess whose fes­ti­val was cel­e­brat­ed in that month. This made it dou­bly hard for Eng­lish Protes­tant groups that want­ed to cleanse Chris­tian­i­ty of “popish” or “pagan” influ­ences. So for right or wrong, they ignored it like they did the day the world calls Christmas.

Sym­bol­i­cal­ly, Quak­ers love the idea of East­er. One of George Fox’s most key open­ings was that“Christ has come to teach the peo­ple him­self!” The idea that Jesus rose again and is with us is pret­ty cen­tral to tra­di­tion­al Quak­er beliefs.

These days East­er is large­ly cel­e­brat­ed by Friends stand­ing up on Sun­day to break the silence of wor­ship with nos­tal­gic sto­ries of East­ers in their pre-Quaker youth. Some­times they’ll admit to hav­ing attend­ed a East­er ser­vice at anoth­er church before com­ing to meet­ing that morn­ing. If you’re real­ly lucky, you’ll get min­istry about flow­ers or hats.

Belief (in anything) and belief (in nothing)

February 27, 2018
· Martin Kelley

So Isaac Smith is back with the third install­ment of his grow­ing series, “Dif­fer­ence Between a Gath­ered Meet­ing and a Focused Meet­ing” and this time he’s ref­er­enc­ing two writ­ers on Quak­er mat­ters, Michael J. Sheer­an and yours tru­ly.

In my pre­vi­ous posts, the dis­tinc­tion between gath­ered and focused meet­ings seemed con­nect­ed to one’s reli­gious out­look, and thus relat­ed to the divide between Christ-centered and uni­ver­sal­ist Quak­ers that has bedev­iled our faith for cen­turies. But as Sheer­an and Kel­ley argue, the more fun­da­men­tal divide in the lib­er­al branch of Quak­erism is between those who seek con­tact with the divine and those who don’t.

My post is, as Smith puts it, “near­ly fif­teen years old,” which is about the length of a social gen­er­a­tion. I’m not sure if I’m in a good posi­tion to pon­tif­i­cate about what has and has­n’t changed. Much of my Quak­er work is with inter­est­ing out­liers, either one-or-one or as part of a loose tribe of Friends who pas­sion­ate­ly care about Quak­erism and are will­ing to go into the weeds to under­stand it. I have very lit­tle recent expe­ri­ence with com­mit­tees on local levels.

One use­ful con­cept that I’ve picked up in the last fif­teen years is that of “func­tion­al athe­ism.” This bypass­es a group’s self-stated under­stand­ings of faith to look at how its decision-making process actu­al­ly works. An orga­ni­za­tion that is func­tion­al­ly athe­ist might be full of very devout peo­ple who togeth­er still decide actions in a com­plete­ly sec­u­lar way. I would guess this has become even more the norm among the acronymic soup of nation­al Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions in the last fif­teen years. In that time a lot of bright ideas have come and gone which flashed briefly with the fuel of donor mon­ey but which did­n’t cre­ate a self-sustaining momen­tum to keep them going long term. Think­ing more strate­gi­cal­ly about what peo­ple are seek­ing in their spir­i­tu­al lives might have helped those cast seeds land on more fer­tile grounds.

The Dif­fer­ence Between a Gath­ered Meet­ing and a Focused Meet­ing (3)

Bonus: the 14-year-old com­ments on my piece include some gen­tle whin­ing about Friends Jour­nal between myself and a reg­u­lar read­er at the time. Now that I’m its senior edi­tor I’m sure there remains plen­ty to grum­ble about.

The lost A List

October 11, 2017
· Martin Kelley

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As A List Hol­ly­wood stars come out to tell their Har­vey Wein­stein couch harass­ment sto­ries, I have to won­der about those who didn’t make it through after say­ing no — actress­es who saw their roles evap­o­rate and left act­ing. The New York Times head­lines pro­fil­ing Wein­stein accusers touts Gwyneth Pal­trow and Angeli­na Jolie but also intro­duces us a woman who is now a psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor in Col­orado. How many bet­ter actress­es and strong-minded women would there be in Hol­ly­wood if so many hadn’t been forced out?

I thought of this after read­ing by a tweet from the actress Rose Marie. She’s best known as one of the jovial side­kicks from the 1960s’ Dick Van Dyke Show. Not to dimin­ish the rest of the cast, but Rose Marie is one of the best rea­sons to watch the show, espe­cial­ly dur­ing those rare moments she’s allowed to step out from her character’s wise­crack­ing spin­ster per­sona and sing or act. On Twit­ter, she shared that she lost a music con­tract in the 1950s because she wouldn’t sleep with a producer.

What if a tal­ent­ed actress like Rose Marie had been giv­en more oppor­tu­ni­ties and wasn’t just known for a sup­port­ing part in a old sit­com? What if the psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor had got­ten the Shake­speare in Love lead? (Imag­ine a world where Pal­trow was only known to 800 or so Face­book friends for too-perfect fam­i­ly pics and memes from dubi­ous health sites.)

Dis­claimer: This is a minor point com­pared with any actress­es who weren’t able to deal with the harass­ment and the indus­try silenc­ing machin­ery. I’m sure there are tragedies that are more than just career pivots.


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