There is a royal seed amongst them which in time God will raise. They are more near Truth than many nations; there is a love begot in me towards them which is endless, but this is my hope concerning them, that he who hath raised me to love them more than many others will also raise his seed in them unto which my love is. Nevertheless, though they be called Turks, the seed of them is near unto God, and their kindness hath in some measure been shown towards his servants.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ hope
Hope in the Middle East
March 27, 2018
As the March Friends Journal theme of Quakers and the Holy Land comes to a close, this week’s featured article is one with hope. Sandy Rea shares stories of teaching in various parts of the Middle East with his wife Stephanie Judson:
I fell in love with Lebanon: with the people, the sound of the language, the tastes of the food, and smells of the spices. Views to the Lebanon mountains from Beirut’s seaside boulevards and rooftops are enticing. Mountain villages have preserved their charm by keeping older homes with the blonde stone and red tile roofs. The hard-working and earnest teachers and the smart, business-minded shop owners are always glad to see foreigners. There is an industriousness, resilience, and pride in the Lebanese that contribute to the repeated risings from so many destructions of the city.
Sandy also gives us histories of times in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews have lived together in peace. It is possible. Today Sandy is clerk of the Middle East Collaborative of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which is working on reconciliation in the region.
Hye Sung Francis on life and Friendly Fire
March 19, 2018
Hye Sung Francis on life and Friendly Fire
Friendly Fire doesn’t exist to build our own brand. We are not a church-planting movement. We are a bunch of poor kids who love God and people. As a collective, we hope to nurture the emerging Religious/Christian Left.
Wait, a new Quaker blog, what retroness is this?
February 14, 2018
And just as we’re talking about the continued downward entropy of blogging, here’s a new Quaker blog. Isaac Smith of Frederick (Md.) Meeting (and Twitter) has the first post in a time-limited, “pop-up” blog. He’s calling it “The Anarchy of the Ranters.” I’ll overlook the similarity to this blog’s name in the hope that the people who have been dropping comments on mine since 2004 asking about the difference between Quakers and Ranters will start bothering him now.
The first post is “Defensiveness as a Theological Problem for Friends,” a good blogging debut.
The question of who belongs in the church, which has always been of central importance, is what’s at stake here, and unfortunately, it is often being answered in ways that are hurtful and alienating — the opposite of what the gospel promises.
Quakers and the ethics of fixed pricing
June 22, 2015
From a 1956 issue of the then-newly rebranded Friends Journal, an explanation of the ethics behind providing a fixed price for goods:
Whether the early Quakers were consciously trying to start a social movement or not is a moot point. Most likely they were not. They were merely seeking to give consistent expression to their belief in the equality of all men as spiritual sons of God. The Quaker custom of marking a fixed price on merchandise so that all men would pay the same price is another case in point. Most probably Friends did this simply because they wanted to be fair to all who frequented their shops and give the sharp bargainer no advantage at the expense of his less skilled brother. It is unlikely that many Quakers adopted fixed prices in the hope of forcing their system on a business world interested only in profit. That part was just coincidence, the coincidence being that Friends hit upon it because of their convictions; the system itself was a natural success.
— Bruce L Pearson, Feb 4 1956
Wikifying Our Blogging
October 14, 2013
Continuing my recent post in reimagining blogs, I’m going to go into some contextual details lifted from the Quaker publications with which I’m either directly associated or that have some claim to my identity.
My blog at Quaker Ranter dates back to the proto-blog I began in 1997 as an new homepage for my two year old “Nonviolence Web” project. The new feature was updated weekly with excerpted material from member projects on Nonviolence.org and related organizations that already had independent websites. We didn’t have RSS or Twitter then but I would manually send out emails to a list; we didn’t have comments but I would publish interesting responses that came by email. The work was relaunched with blogging software in 2003 and the voice became more individual and my focus became more Quaker and tech.
The articles then were like they are now: reversely chronological, with categories, tagging, and site searching that allow older material to be accessed. The most important source of archive visibility is external: Google. People can easily find material that is directly relevant to a question they’re addressing right now. In many instances, they’ll never even click through to the site homepage, much less categories, tags, etc. As I said in my last post, these first-time visitors are often trying to understand something new; the great majority bounce off the page and follow another search result on a matter of a few seconds, but some small but important percentage will be ripe for new ideas and connections and might be willing to try new associations.
But it’s random. I’m a bit of a nerd in my chosen interests and have been blogging long enough that I generally have at least a few interesting posts on any particular sub-topic. Most of these have been inspired by colleagues, friends, my wife, and random conversations I’ve found myself in.
Some of the most meaningful blog posts – those with legs – have involved me integrating some new thinker or idea into my worldview. The process will have started months or sometimes years before when another spiritual nerd recommended a book or article. In the faith world there’s always books that are obscure to newcomers but essential for those trying to go deeper into their faith. You’ll be in a deep conversations with someone and they’ll ask (often with a twinkle in their eye) “have you read so-and-so?” (This culture if sharing is especially important for Friends, who traditionally have no clergy or seminaries).
A major role of my blog has been to bring these sorts of conversations into a public realm – one that can be Googled and followed. The internet has helped us scale-up this process and make it more available to those who can’t constantly travel.
When I have real-world conversations now, I often have recourse to cite some old blog post. I’m sharing the “have you read” conversation in a way that can be eavesdropped by hundreds.
But how are people who stumble in my site for the first time going to find this?
The issue isn’t just limited to an obscure faith blog. Yesterday I learned about a cool (to me) blog written by a dad who researches and travels to neat nature spots in the area with his kids and writes up a post about what-to-see and kid-issues-to-be-aware-of. But when it’s a nice Saturday afternoon and I find myself in a certain locale, how can I know if he’s been anywhere nearby unless I go through all the archives or hope the search works or hope his blog’s categorization taxonomy is complete?
What I’m thinking is that we could try to create meta indexes to our blogs in a wiki model. Have a whole collection of introductory pages where we list and summarize relevant articles with links.
In the heyday of SEO, I used to tag the heck out if posts and have the pages act as a sort of automated version of this, but again, this it was chronological. And it was work. Even remembering to tag is work. I would spend a couple of days ignoring clients to metatag each page on the site, only to redo the work a few months later with even more metadata complexity. Writing a whole shadow meta blog indexing the blog would be a major (and unending task). It wouldn’t garner the rush of immediate Facebook likes. But it would be supremely useful for someone wanting to explore an issue of particular interest to them at that moment.
And one more Quaker aside that I think will nevertheless be of interest to the more techie readers. I’ve described Quakerism as a wiki spirituality. Exhibit one is the religious movement’s initial lack of creeds or written instruction. Even our pacifism, for which we’re most well known, was an uncodified testimony in the earliest years.
As Friends gained more experience living in community, they would publish advices – short snippets of wisdom that were collectively-approved using consensus decision making. They were based on experience. For example, they might find that members who abused alcohol, say, or repeatedly tested the dress code might cause other sorts of problems for the community and they’d minute a warning against these practices.
These advices were written over time; as more were approved it became burdensome to find relevant advices when some issue started tearing up a congregation. So they were collected into books – unofficial at first, literally hand-copied from person to person. These eventually became official – published “books of disciplines,” collections of the collective wisdom organized by topic. Their purpose and scope (and even their name) has changed over the ensuing centuries but their impulse and early organization is one that I find useful when thinking about how we could rethink the categorization issues of our twenty first century blogs and commenting systems.
Alliance Cemetery
July 28, 2009
I was hired to redesign the website of a cemetery that represents a fascinating slice of South Jersey history. In the 1880s, a group of Jews escaped Russian pogroms, came to America and started a “return to the soil” movement that led to the establishment of an agricultural colony in the small Salem County crossroads of Norma, New Jersey. Before long they established Alliance Cemetery.
The new Alliance website highlights the entrance gate. The cemetery has hired a surveying company to do a detailed map of the plots and we hope to add this in with a Google Maps mash-up when the data becomes available. A detailed history and photos are also in the works.
The design is hand-coded from scratch and is probably the most tasteful design of my portfolio. The pages themselves are editable by the client using CushyCMS and the Directions page has an integrated Google Map.
Visit: AllianceCemetery.com
QuakerQuaker.org, new home to the blog watch
January 3, 2006
I’ve moved the Quaker Blog Watch material to a new website, QuakerQuaker.org. It’s more-or-less the same material with more-or-less the same design but the project has become popular enough that it seems like a good time to send it off on its own. I hope to find ways of making it more collaborative in the near-future.
You can subscribe to the QuakerQuaker Watch via Bloglines or to the daily email by following the links. If you’re already following the Watch in a subscription reader, you should change the source of the feed to http://feeds.quakerquaker.org/quaker if you don’t want to miss out on any future innovations. If you have the Watch currently listed in your blog’s sidebar you won’t have to change anything.
At some point when the dust of the move has settled (and I have the new Quakerfinder.org launched as part of my FGC work), I’ll take a moment to wax philosophical about the evolution of this project and will toss out a few ideas about where it might go in the future. In the meantime, let me know if anything is broken, confused or grammatically mangled.
A kind of retrospective history of the project is available on the “quakerquaker thread”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/quakerquaker/ of the Ranter.