The September issue of Friends Journal is online, with articles about Relationships. I hope you all like the selection! This Friday’s feature: True to Your Word, a really thoughtful look at non-monogamy. Also to check out: our report on Public Friends, a new ministry from Ashley Wilcox.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ FJ
Links
May 2, 2024
In 2020, online worship went from a fringe novelty to a mass phenomenon. It’s definitely an option that’s here to stay and British Friends have now integrated one online worship group fully into the monthly meeting structure (has any other yearly meeting done this already?). It’ll be fascinating to see how this continues to develop.
I was remiss in sharing the March Quakers Today podcast, which looked at Quakers, Birds, and Justice. Friends have long been especially interested in the natural world. One of the interviewees is Rebecca Heider, who wrote A Quaker Guide to Birdwatching in last month’s issue of FJ.
The New Quaker Histories
February 8, 2024
I watched a great Zoom talk this week, hosted by Haverford College and featuring Ben Pink Dandelion and Robynne Rogers Healey. The topic was “The New History of Quakerism” and its focus was on the shifts happening in Quaker academic histories since the 1990s. Dandelion did a fantastic job putting the last 150 years of Quaker historiography in context and laying out the positives of more recent developments: more academic rigor, a wider diversity of voices, changing foci of topics, and strong interest by academic publishers.
Healey identified three major fields in which the new histories are challenging what are often comforting apologetics of previous Quaker studies: the equality of women, slavery and indigenous relations, and pacifism. All these are much more complicated than the stories we tell. She then listed three trends: decentering London and Philadelphia, reevaluating the so-called quietist period, and including academics and histories of the Global South.
Dandelion said these changes were “all for the better,” and while I agree wholeheartedly with him in regards to content, there’s one way in which the new publishing opportunities are failing us: to be blunt, price.
Take the Penn State University Press series, “The New History of Quakerism,” that both panelists have written for. The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830 – 1937 edited by Stephen W. Angell, Dandelion, and David Harrington Watt is $125. Quakerism in the Atlantic World, 1690 – 1830 edited by Healey is $90. Quaker Women, 1800 – 1920, edited by Healey and Carole Dale Spencer is $125.
Both Healey and Dandelion acknowledged the problem of inaccessible prices in their talk. Dandelion suggested that meeting libraries might be able to purchase these books but I think that’s more hopeful than realistic. My small meeting certainly couldn’t. I went to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Library and they wouldn’t let me check out The Quaker World (FJ review), the 2022 collection edited by my friends C. Wess Daniels and Rhiannon Grant. It’s got a lot of great authors and I heartily recommend it, but only in absentia because at $250 I’m never going to read it.
As an amateur Quaker history lover, these are all volumes I would love to read, but I’m not writing this because of my own personal anguish (real as it is!) but because the prices are breaking what has been an essential transmission system for new histories. In the late 1980s, Thomas Hamm published The Transformation of American Quakerism, 1800 – 1907 with Indiana University Press. It was $25 and I splurged. It became an important source in my understanding of Quaker divisions and nineteenth-century quietism. Still, decades later, when I write blog posts, or teach Quakerism 101, or answer an online question, I’m often regurgitating perspectives I learned from Hamm.
Go to Facebook, go to Reddit, and people aren’t sharing these groundbreaking histories. Just now, randomly opening Facebook, there’s a post by someone asking about James Nayler, with someone answering it by referencing Hugh Barbour’s mid-1960s history. I love Barbour but he had his own filters and we’ve learned a lot since then.
Every meeting I’ve been a part of had a small number of history nerds in residence who led the Quakerism 101 classes or hosted book groups or Bible study, and they brought their nerdiness to their meeting tasks. To use Healey’s list, many Quakers in the benches still think of Friends’ race relations in terms of abolitionism, still consider early Friends as unalloyed feminists, and rarely give a thought to Friends in the Global South. I recently read a new article about a local meeting that was founded by one of the largest slaveholding families in the area and the only mention of slavery was its much-later anti-slavery society; I really want these kinds of stories to be too embarrassing to publish. Quakers in the benches need the perspectives of these new historians to understand ourselves.
Are there ways that academics can repurpose their inaccessible work so that it can trickle down to a general audience? I’m glad this Zoom talk was open to the public and well publicized: at least some of us could watch it and know the outlines of the changing historiography. But how else can we work to bridge the gap? Blog posts, articles in general publications, podcasts, Pendle Hill pamphlets? What are we doing and what more could we do? I’m in Quaker publishing, obviously, and so part of the problem if there’s a breakdown in transmission. We review the books and QuakerSpeak often dives into history. My friend Jon Watts’s Thee Quaker podcast has some wonderfully nerdy episodes. But all these feel like snippets: ten minutes here, 2000 words there. When I go to learn more, I’m stuck by the limitations of the open internet, caught in JSTOR articles I can’t access, or histories only available in print for $100-plus.
I’m not blaming anyone here. I understand we’re all caught in these capitalist and academic systems. I just wonder what we can do.
Also, special shoutout to Rhiannon Grant, who is the only Quaker academic I know of who is seemingly everywhere: Blog, articles in FJ, installments in the “Quaker Quicks” series, podcast segments on the BBC and Thee Quaker (she even guested on one of my FJ author chats!). Plus she’s on Mastodon, Bluesky, and TikTok and has her own welcome-to-Quakers page. I don’t think this ubiquitous approach is at all replicable for other academics. Even I’m not a proponent of social media ubiquity, preferring to focus on a few platforms.
Year-end list
December 29, 2023
We’ve done the year-end numbers at Friends Journal and have the list of the top-five most-read articles this year. This stats are for the website of course — no way to tell what articles people might be skipping past in the print issues — but since we have more online readers than print subscribers these days, it’s a fair count. Interesting to see that Olivia Chalkley’s “Young Adults Want What Early Friends Had” took the top spot. I think that’s because it combines three topics that people love to read about: the boundaries of Quaker beliefs; what’s happening with young Quakers; stories of beloved Quaker institutions.
Another perennial favorite topic among Friends is membership and FJ is looking for articles on that for next May’s issue. Good chance that 2024’s most-read list might have something from this issue. If you or anyone you know might want to write for it, read our Editor’s Desk call for submissions.
What was a time when you rebelled and why?
August 15, 2023
The August Quakers Today podcast dropped Tuesday morning. It’s a nice mix, with an interview with Quaker hunter Timothy Tarkelly, an excerpt from Erin Wilson’s recent QuakerSpeak on LGBTQ inclusion, and an interview with “JollyQuaker” Mark Russ, who’s building great buzz for his new book, Quaker Shaped Christianity (check out the FJ review by William Shetter).
What would you like to see in Friends Journal?
February 22, 2023
Every eighteen months or so Friends Journal start brainstorming new themes and boil them down into a list. We’re now plotting out themes for the spring of 2024 and beyond. Part of this process is asking readers what they’d like to see us cover and if you follow FJ on Facebook, Twitter, or Mastodon, you’ve probably seen us asking there. But I would also like to hear from Quaker Ranter readers:
What topics would YOU like to see Friends Journal addressing in the future?
We’ve been running themed issues for over a decade now. Check out the list of themes since 2012 or look through the archives to reminiscence about past issues. There’s a good chance we’ve already covered the subject you’re interested in, but it might be a good time for us to take a new look or a fresh spin. Leave a comment here or email me at martin@friendsjournal.org with any ideas you have.
Too much politeness?
October 10, 2022
Johanna Jackson and I speak about the problems of politeness and buried conflict in Quaker meetings in this week’s FJ author chat. We tried not to get too specific about conflicts we’ve seen in our own Quaker experiences: what matters is not necessarily individual instances (people can be jerks, this is understood) but a pattern of not reconciling and healing that many Friends and would-be Friends have observed.
How do we reshape the culture in our meetings to allow for more vulnerability and healthy emotions and how do we heal from conflicts that happened years or decades ago but still shape our meetings? Johanna’s article, Beyond Politeness, appears in the current issue of Friends Journal.
Quakerly competition?
February 13, 2019
A quick update that we at Friends Journal have extended the deadline for an upcoming issue on Friends and competition. It’s a really interesting topic and I’d like to see some more articles to choose from. In my “Editor’s Desk” post trying to drum up writing interest, I dug through the FJ archives to find previous discussions on the topic. I’ll excerpt a few here:
If you look back through Friends Journal archives, you’ll find warnings against competitive behavior. In 1955 Bess B. Lane of Swarthmore (Pa.) Meeting wrote that schools should “Place emphasis on cooperation, sharing, rather than on competition” and wondered if “competition is being overstressed in our schools.” In 1972, Christopher H. Anderson, then a senior at Wilmington College, had stronger words. He contrasted his Quaker education with public schools, which he said “breed a social conformity, an intellectual blandness and a repugnant spirit of competition.”
If you know anyone who is interested in the topic, please forward this along!