On the face of it, it may be kind of weird for a vegan like me to like an article about hunting (much less publish a recipe for squirrel quiche) but anyone who brings in Thomas Clarkson to talk about Quaker cultural values is someone I’ll listen to.
[Clarkson’s] contemporaries were blinded by tradition and never stopped to ask, “how far are they allowable?” amidst concerns of human conduct. Even the phrasing “how far are they allowable” suggests a limit. Perhaps hunting is an allowable and acceptable way of life up to a certain point: that point being needless violence and danger.
I have tended to describe this shift in understanding as the moment when Quakerism “clicked” for me — when it ceased to be just the weird subculture I grew up in, and more a matter of conviction. Practices that I ignored or never quite understood, like making group decisions without taking a vote, now made sense, because they were borne out of an attempt to make Christ the present teacher in all affairs.
Isaac’s piece stems in part from the December Friends Journal, on Quakers and Christianity. A large percentage of the submissions we received for the issue had remarkably similar personal stories: people had grown up in a restrictive religious tradition and come to Liberal Friends because of its openness to spiritual seeking. If anything they were hostile to Christianity and distinctive Quaker peculiarities when they joined but over time they slowly shifted, often after getting to know grounded elder Friends. Now they quietly identified as Christian Friends.
We could have printed a whole issue of (mostly) convinced Liberal Friends who had rediscovered Christianity. Instead we picked a representative sample for the print edition and published the rest as part of our our extended online edition; you can read it all at the online contents. Although Isaac’s story is different (he grew up as a Friend) it shares a similar trajectory.
(Issac also has some questions about Quaker publishing, with a link to a great 2009 blog post from Johan Maurer. I feel I should talk about this issue too but that’ll take a bit more pondering on my part).
Thoughts after listening to the latest edition of the podcast:
So we can imagine Mark Zuckerberg and his assistant both wearing t‑shirts and jeans, but one of them buys from, say, DKNY or Kenneth Cole, while the other buys from Target or Wal-Mart. This would count as a responsible form of plain dress, per Barclay.
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.
Well-know British journalist (tho non-Friend) weighs in on recent headlines claiming British Friends are taking God out of their next edition of Faith and Practice: The Quakers are right. We don’t need God
The Quakers’ lack of ceremony and liturgical clutter gives them a point from which to view the no man’s land between faith and non-faith that is the “new religiosity”. A dwindling 40% of Britons claim to believe in some form of God, while a third say they are atheists
The piece is sure to get everyone’s dander up. It feels to me as if Jenkins is chasing the headline to advance his own argument without regard to how his statement might polarize Friends. But this is one of the rarer instances in which it’s worth digging through the comments on this one; some are better than the article itself.
Two things on the internet that I consistently like are NeimanLab and Kottke.org. The former is Harvard’s journalism foundation and its associated blog. They consistently publish thought-provoking lessons from media pioneers. If there’s an interesting online publishing model being tried, Neiman Labs will profile it. Kottke is one of the original old school blogs. Jason highlights things that are interesting to him and by and large, most of the posts happen to be interesting to me. He’s also one of the few breakout blogging stars who has kept going.
So today Neiman Labs posted an interview with Jason Kottke. Of course I like it.
There are a few things that Jason has done that I find remarkable. One is that he’s threaded an almost impossible path that has held back the centrifugal forces of the modern internet. He never went big and he never went small. By big, I mean he never tried to ramp his site up to become a media empire. No venture capitalist money, no clickbait headlines, no pivot to video or other trendy media chimera. He also didn’t go small: his blog has never been a confessional. While that traffic when to Facebook, his kind of curated links and thoughts is something that still works best as a blog.
Although I don’t blog myself too much anymore, I do think a lot about media models for Friends Journal. Its reliance on non-professional opinion writing prefigured blogs. It’s a fully digital magazine now, even as it continues as a print magazine. The membership model Kottke talks about (and Neiman Labs frequently profiles) is a likely one for us going into the long term.
I’ve finally done it. I’ve read John Woolman’s Journal. Here I’ve been an activist among Quakers for almost two decades and I’ve read one of our Big Books.
I have tried before. Many’s the time over the years where I cracked open Moulton’s edition to settle myself down. Chapter one read, chapter two read. Then to chapter three, opening with:
About this time, believing it good for me to settle, and thinking seriously about a companion, my heart was turned to the Lord with desires that He would give me wisdom to proceed therein agreeably to His will, and He was pleased to give me a well-inclined damsel, Sarah Ellis, to whom I was married the 18th of Eighth Month, 1749.
And that’s it. One run-on sentence about courting and marrying his wife. I always put the book down here. I tuck a bookmark in with all good intentions of continuing after dinner. But the book sits on the coffee table till a week or so goes by, whereupon it’s moved to the library area for a month or so until it’s finally reshelved. The bookmarks stays put until a year or two passes and I re-start the Journal with renewed determination.
I know why the sentence stops me. Throughout my twenties and early thirties a lot of my emotional energy was drained in the (mostly Quaker) dating scene. In theory I thought it a good time “for me to settle” and would have been quite content with a “well-inclined damsel.” But the chaos of my personal family history combined with the casual dating culture combined to keep me distracted with the largely-manufactured drama of relationship roller-coasters. For better or worse, if and when I ever write a journal I will have to find a way to talk about the ways this dating era both fed and stunted my spiritual growth.
One of the lesson I learned back in the early 90s when I was editor at New Society Publishers was that I should pay attention when I put a manuscript or book down. The temptation is to chalk it up to tiredness or a busy life but I found there was usually something going on in the text itself that caused me to drop it. When I picked the manuscript back up and re-read the passages on either side of my abandoned bookmark, I found some sort of shift of tone that weakened the book.
I appreciate that Quaker journals are not racy memoirs; they have a specific religious education purpose. But I think it’s natural to look to them for clues about how to live our lives. Samuel Bownas talks a bit about his engagement and David Ferris turns meeting his future wife into quite a humorous story. Perhaps Woolman was such a saintly aesthete that Sarah was simply presented to him with no futher questions. But still, there’s a level of privacy in Woolman’s writings that separates him from us; I’ll return to this is part three.
Before I go: so how did I get through the journal this time? Two things are different now: first, my five year wedding anniversary is only a few weeks away; and second: Woolman’s Journal is now always with me inside my Palm Pilot (courtesy the Christian Classics Etherial Library). A few weeks ago I found myself on the train without reading material and started reading!
Next Time: Wrapping ourselves in the flag of Woolman
I started Nonviolence.org in late 1995 as a place to publicize the work of the US peace movement which was not getting out to a wide (or a young) audience. I built and maintained the websites of a few dozen hosted groups (including the War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi USA) but I quickly realized that the Nonviolence.org homepage itself could be used for more than just as a place to put links to member groups. I could use it to highlight the articles I thought should get more publicity, whether on or off the Nonviolence.org domain.
The homepage adapted into what is now a recognizable blog format on November 13, 1997 when I re-named the homepage “Nonviolence Web Upfront” and started posting links to interesting articles from Nonviolence.org member groups. In response to a comment the other day I wondered how that fit in with the evolution of blogging. I was shocked to learn from Wikipedia’s that the term “weblog” wasn’t coined until December of that year. I think is less a coincidence than a confirmation that many of us were trying to figure out a format for sharing the web with others.
The earliest edition stored on Archive.org is from December 4, 1997. It focused on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day. To give you an sense of the early independently-published articles, the January 2, 1998 edition included a guest piece by John Steitz, “Is the Nonviolence Web a Movement Half-Way House” that sounds eerily similar to recent discussions on Quaker Ranter.
Below is an excerpt from the email announcement for “Nonviolence Web Upfront” (typically for me, I sent it out after I had been running the new format for awhile):
NONVIOLENCE WEB NEWS, by Martin Kelley Week of December 29, 1997
CONTENTS
Introducing “Nonviolence Web Upfront”
New Procedures New Website #1: SERPAJ New Website #2: Stop the Cassini Flyby Two Awards Numbers Available Upon Request Weekly Visitor Counts
With my travelling and holiday schedule, it’s been hard to keep regular NVWeb News updates coming along, but it’s been a great month and there’s a lot. I’m especially proud of the continuing evolution of what I’m now calling “Nonviolence Web Upfront,” seen by 1800 – 2200 people a month!
INTRODUCING “NONVIOLENCE WEB UPFRONT”
The new magazine format of the NVWeb’s homepage has been needing a name. It needed to mentioned the “Nonviolence Web” and I wanted it to imply that it was the site’s homepage (sometimes referred to as a “frontpage”) and that it contained material taken from the sites of the NVWeb.
So the name is “Nonviolence Web Upfront” and a trip to http://www.nonviolence.org will see that spelled out big on top of the weekly-updated articles.
There’s also an archive of the weekly installments found at the bottom of NVWeb Upfront. It’s quite a good collection already!
Now that this is moving forward, I encourage everyone to think about how they might contribute articles. If you write an interesting opinion piece, essay, or story that you think would fit, send it along to me. For example, “War Toys: Re-Action-ist Figures” FOR’s Vincent Romano’s piece from the Nov. 27 edition, was an essay he had already written and made a good complimentary piece for the YouthPeace Week special. But don’t worry about themes: NVWeb Upfront is meant not only to be timely but to show the breadth of the nonviolence movement, so send your pieces along!
Friends Journal 
Quakers