A nice piece on Philadelphia Friend O:
For O., a member of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, carrying this query for pastoral ministry awakens joy in her heart. It raises important questions: Are we transformed by the power of love, during our biological conception as human beings? Might our lives be a measureless love story about creation?
It’s hard to capture O’s personality in ASCII characters. She’s been in a few QuakerSpeak videos.
High Profiles magazine has published a nice interview with Alastair McIntosh, a Quaker academic, author, and activist. It’s not all about his Quakerism but then it’s nice to see someone using it as a just a piece of their identity. I love seeing our roots laid out in the same sentence as a critique of the Murdoch press, etc.
The North is the part of England to which the radicals retreated under Norman violence, and I suspect that’s part of why the more radical side of England comes out there. Quakerism developed mainly in the north and west of England and I suspect that nonconformity comes out of that radical spirit – which needs to be rekindled, not in ways manipulated by the Murdoch press or the Conservative Party or Ukip but much more in the way that William Blake understood, of connecting with the spirit of the land.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that we ran a nice piece by McIntosh in the February issue of Friends Journal. He talked about Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk with Quaker roots. Again, our spirituality in context.
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.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has published a piece on the rehabilitation of disowned seventeenth century Quaker rabblerouser Benjamin Lay
On Saturday, April 21, 2018, Abington Monthly Meeting unveiled a burial stone for Sarah & Benjamin Lay. The event which featured opening remarks by author Marcus Rediker and local resident and Quaker Avis Wanda McClinton was followed by a gathering in the meetinghouse in the manner of a Friends Memorial Meeting.
Abington was the first Friends meeting I ever visited and I’ve loved the story of Lay since the time I first stumbled on it (even as a kid I was enough of a local history nerd that I might have read of Lay’s antics before I ever met a Quaker). I’m personally so happy to see him get this wider recognition. The PYM piece is all-text but much of the grave marker ceremony has been posted to YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e-4_YZxeQk
Isaac Smith wonders whether the title of Chris Venables’s recent piece, “Could Quakerism be the radical faith that the millennial generation is looking for?,” is following Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.
I’d put the dilemma of Quakerism in the 21st century this way: It’s not just that our treasures are in jars of clay, it’s that no one would even know the treasures were there, and it seems like they’re easier to find elsewhere. And how do we know that what we have are even treasures?
I gave my own skeptical take on Venables’s article yesterday. Smith hits on part of what worries me when he says current religious disengagement is of a kind to be immune to “better social media game or a more streamlined church bureaucracy.” These are the easy, value-free answers institutions like to turn to.
I’m thinking about these issues not only because of this article but also because Friends Journal is seeking submissions for thr August issue “Going Viral with Quakerism.” A few weeks ago I wrote a post that referred back to Quaker internet outreach 25 years ago.
Could Quakerism be the radical faith that the millennial generation is looking for?
Chris Venables spent a year working with Quakers in Britain (see update below) and now asks Could Quakerism be the radical faith that the millennial generation is looking for?
The nature of religion has changed, within Quakers we have seen the numbers of young people engaging in our community fall as the effects of economic insecurity have taken hold. And perhaps more importantly, because ‘young adults’ have no time for institutions that often seem arcane and irrelevant, and which have failed to engage with the realities of life for the vast majority of people in our society.
I wish I could share more of his enthusiasm. I’m not seeing anything particularly game-changing in his article. Half of it is generic cliches about millennial preference with extrapolation that they should align with decontextualized Quaker values. He cites a few happening young adult Quaker scenes in the UK and a promising Young Quakers podcast five episodes old; he’s fond of American Emily Provance’s blog. Good stuff to be sure, but you could pick pretty much any year in recent memory and point to similar evidence and imagine an imminent surge. It’s 2018 and we’re still saying “hey this could happen!” It could but it hasn’t so why hasn’t it and what can we do about it?
Also in these contexts “radical faith” sometimes sounds like buzzwords for non-faith. Is the Quaker meetinghouse just a quiet empty room for participants to BYOF (bring your own faith)?
Update: Chris chimed in via Twitter to add that his piece’s observations aren’t just from the year of working with BrYM Friends:
Ah, I’ll take a read of yours too — but those thoughts come from my experience of being around Quakers over the last 8 years, inc setting up a new young adult group (Westminster!), visiting Qs across Britain, and interviewing many of our community over the last year!
Yesterday I mentioned an interesting conversation with Chad Stephenson years ago about his theory/metaphor that Convergent Friends were like New Jazz traditionalists. His piece had only been published in the Spirit Rising anthology but Chad saw my post and has graciously put it up on his blog!
Throughout Quaker faith, divergence from its roots has brought newer, modern audiences to Quakers and progressed with new pathways while abandoning the shared past commonalities. Yet as a splintered tradition, Quakers have begun to suffer each other as distant relatives do when dining during the holidays; a failing coordination of growth which has led instead to disunity and a lack of understanding and respect for common roots essential to creating a mutually enhancing ecosystem of faith grounded in the Light.
A great piece from newish Quaker blogger Josh Talbot on the personal struggle to follow the peace testimony: Not Falling Into the Fire of My Own Ire.
Losing yourself to anger is possible even with anger focused against injustice and cruelty. You can become so focused on the target of your rage. That you do not notice when you have lost sight of your goals and are only in it for the fight. Even following the Peace Testimony of Non-Violence we need to recognize when we are no longer being Non-Aggressive.
Like many convinced Friends, I came to the society through activism. I had met plenty of people who let righteous anger serve as cover for more visceral hatred. One eye-opening protest in the 90s was in a rural part of Pennsylvania. When one of the locals screamed the cliche of the era — “Go get a job!” — a protestor shouted back, “I’ve got a job and I make more than you.” It was true even as it was cruel and irrelevant and braggy.
I didn’t see this kind of behavior as much with the Friends I saw at various protests, which is largely why I started gravitating toward them whenever possible. I could see that there was something in the Quaker culture and value system that was able to navigate between righteous and personal anger and draw the line in difficult situations. I love Josh’s description of the “Craig Ferguson” method:
I ask myself. “Does this need to be said?” “Does this need to be said by me?” “Does this need to be said by me right now?” Doing this cuts down on moments of spontaneous anger.
This could also describe the Quaker discernment method for ministry. Maybe there’s something to the care we take (or at least aim for) in that process that gives us a little more self-discipline in the heat of protest or that helps us sort through thorny ethical issues that run through our own community.
https://quakerreturns.blogspot.com/2018/04/not-falling-into-fire-of-my-own-ire.html