A fishy story:
This isn’t your ordinary fish story, though it is incredible. Nevertheless, there’s a lesson about reality being taught here, a lesson to be confirmed by experience alone. For the experience goes well beyond that which we have learned is possible in nature, just like the story itself.
http://www.quakerquaker.org/xn/detail/2360685:BlogPost:161406
Emily Provance is back talking about the disconnect between different Quaker subcultures:
In other words, as far as your personal experience tells you, Quaker meeting is supposed to be about fun and excitement — but suddenly, you’re seeing planning and structure instead. Quaker meeting is supposed to be about light-heartedness — but suddenly, you’re seeing methodical rule-following. Quaker meeting is supposed to be about playfulness — but suddenly, you’re seeing cautious cooperation.
Last month I talked a little bit about the problem when Quaker youth culture and meeting culture don’t quite line up.
Jessica Kellgren-Fozard is a disabled TV presenter with 266,000+ followers on YouTube. She’s also a lifelong Friend from the UK. She’s just released a video in which she talks about her understanding of Quakerism. It’s pretty good. She occasionally implies that some specifically British procedural process is intrinsic to all Quakers but other than that it all rings true, certainly to her experience as a UK Friend.
I must admit that the world of YouTube stars is foreign to me. This is essentially a webcam vlog post but the lighting and hair and costuming is meticulous. Her notes include affiliate links for the dress she’s wearing ($89 and yes, they ship internationally), a 8 1/2 minute video tutorial about curling you hair in her vintage style (it has over 33,000 views). If you follow her on Instagram and Twitter you’ll soon have enough details on lipstick and shoe choices to be able to fully cosplay her.
But don’t laugh too much, because in between the self presentation tips, Kellgren-Fozard tackles really hard subjects – growing up gay in school, living with disabilities – in ways that are approachable and intimate, funny and instructive. And with a quarter million YouTube followers, she’s reaching people with a message of kindness and inclusion and understanding that feels pretty Quakerly to me. Margaret Fell liked herself a red dress sometimes and it’s easy to argue George Fox would be a YouTuber today.
Bonus: Jessica Kellgren-Fozard will host a live Q&A chat on her Quakerism this coming Monday. If I’m calculating my timezones correctly, it’ll be noon here on the U.S. East Coast. I plan to tune in.
This Blog Begins – An Early Quaker Online Archive
I intend this informational blog to help others explore the thought and experience of early Quakers, chiefly before 1700, who knew, preached, and reflected on lives transformed and guided by God, who gathered them into a covenanted people.
One issue to which I am particularly sensitive is how our obsession with the past comes across to newcomers. Some people (especially those with Quaker ancestors) are excited by our history, while other people are turned off or simply puzzled by Quaker jargon and Quaker genealogies, which they experience as a serious barrier to being included.
The Rise of Liberal Quakerism, Part 7
This was the first direct Quaker confrontation with the state in more than 200 years. The absolutists went to jail. For a while, Wormwood Scrubbs prison was the largest Friends meeting in London. The experience also turned Friends against solitary confinement, which they had originally pioneered.
This week’s featured Friends Journal article is Selling Hope by Tom Hoopes. Hoopes is a teacher at George School, one of the two prominent Quaker boarding schools in the Philadelphia area, and he talks about the branding challenges of “Quaker values” which historic Quaker schools so often fall back on when describing their mission. We often describe these with the simplistic “SPICES” forumulation (Eric Moon wrote about the problems over-emphasizing these). Hoopes encourages us to expand our language:
We can use any number of descriptors that do not sound so haughty and nearsighted. I think we should continually lift up some key pieces of vocabulary that really do make the Quaker way distinctive. Here is a brief list, to which I am sure Friends can add others: “that of God in every person”; “the Inner Light”; “continuing revelation”; “discernment”; “sense of the meeting”; “rightly led and rightly ordered”; “Friend speaks my mind”; “the still, small voice within”; “way opening”; “clerking”; “query”; “worship sharing”; “expectant waiting”; “centering down”; “Quaker decision making”; “Quaker tradition”; “faith and practice”; “seeking clearness”; “Quaker testimonies”; and of course, “meeting for worship.”
Longtime FJ readers will remember a much-discussed 2008 article by Hoopes, “Young Families and Quakerism: Will the Center Hold?” It certain spoke to my condition as a parent struggling with family life among Friends:
Let’s look at some hard realities facing many Quaker parents of young children today. They are frequently exhausted and frazzled from attending to their children’s needs in addition to their own all week long. They desperately need a break from their own children, and they may feel guilty about that fact. They are often asked — or expected — to serve as First-day school teachers or childcare providers. Hence, their experience of meeting is not one of replenishment, but of further depletion.
I wish I could report that Philadelphia Friends took the 2008 article to heart.
Chalk this one up as another whisper-down-the-lane. As readers will probably remember, a few weeks ago, non-Friend Simon Jenkins wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian about the possibility of British Friends dropping God from their Faith and Practice. There were a lot of exaggerations in it; the yearly meeting session was mostly deciding whether it it felt led to start the long process of revising the document of Friends’ belief and practice. Many yearly meetings do this every generation or so. AFAIK, there was no substantive discussion on what the revisions might bring. At the time, I speculated that “Jenkins is chasing the headline to advance his own argument without regard to how his statement might polarize Friends.”
Now we have another headline chaser. The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary more or less reads Jenkins’s piece aloud on his radio show (hat-tip havedanson on the Quakers subreddit). He lightly skips over the fact that Jenkins isn’t Quaker and admits to limited experience of Quaker worship. The SBTS president, Albert Mohler, repeatedly calls the Guardian article a “news report” even though it is clearly labeled as an opinion piece. If any publicity is good publicity then it’s good that non-Friends like Jenkins and now Mohler are talking about the decision-making process of a Quaker yearly meeting, but this is stupid piled on stupid.
From a media perspective, I get it: Mohler has a daily 24-minute podcast to fill. He has interns who scan buzzy news items. They rearrange the text with interstitials like “he continues, and I quote” and “he goes on to say” so that Mohler can spend five minutes reading an article without sounding like he’s just reading an article. But seriously, how does the president of a major seminary have such disregard for anything approaching academic rigor? Also: how much regurgitated junk is on the internet simply because people need to fill time? The Quaker caution about giving ministry just because you’re paid to give ministry and it’s time to give ministry seems apt in this case.
Friends Journal