Tag Archives ⇒ position

Risking Community

April 20, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Gregg Kosel­ka, a post that rewards read­ing a few times: Risk­ing Community

When I look around, there is still so much hurt that needs to be processed. There are still real dif­fer­ences in phi­los­o­phy about how to build com­mu­ni­ty. Some see how much needs to rad­i­cal­ly change so that those who have been mar­gin­al­ized can tru­ly be safe and have agency, and so want to go slow­ly to build it cor­rect­ly. Some see the dam­age hav­ing no com­mu­ni­ty can bring, and want to do what they can to build some­thing as safe­ly as pos­si­ble. I hate that these dif­fer­ences are still caus­ing dam­age to our rela­tion­ships and our com­mu­ni­ties. I don’t have a solution.

I appre­ci­ate the way he tries to under­stand the flip sides of com­mu­ni­ty and insti­tu­tion­al­ism; per­haps schism could be seen as the moment they can no longer be nego­ti­at­ed. As pas­tor of one of the “most insti­tu­tion­al of insti­tu­tion­al church­es for 15 years,” he was in the cen­ter of the cen­trifu­gal forces that tore apart both North­west Year­ly Meet­ing as a whole and indi­vis­i­ble Friends church­es with­in it. From a dis­tance of 3000 miles and 150 years of diverg­ing Quak­er his­to­ry, I’m not in a posi­tion to say whether things could have gone dif­fer­ent­ly or whether indi­vid­u­als always act­ed in their best ways but I can appre­ci­ate that it there must have been a lot of impos­si­ble choic­es and no-good answers as polar­iza­tion gave way to disintegration.

Risk­ing Community

Quakers and Mental Health

March 29, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Well this one hits home for me. The new Quak­er­S­peak talks to Ore­gon social work­er Melody George in the top­ic of Quak­ers and Men­tal Health:

I real­ly see men­tal diver­si­ty as a gift to a com­mu­ni­ty, and that the folks that I serve and that I’ve worked with are very resilient. If they tell you their sto­ries about how they’ve got­ten through their trau­mat­ic sit­u­a­tions and what’s helped them to keep going, faith is a huge part of that. And we have a lot to learn from their strength and resilience.

My fam­i­ly has had very avoid­able and out-of-nowhere con­flicts at two reli­gious spaces — one a Friends meet­ing and the oth­er a Pres­by­ter­ian church — over easy acco­mo­da­tions for my son Fran­cis. It seems like many of the dynam­ics that we’ve seen are not dis­sim­i­lar to those that keep oth­ers out of meet­ing com­mu­ni­ties. Who are we will­ing to adapt for? Is com­fort and famil­iar­i­ty our main goal?

Melody also wrote for Friends Jour­nal a few years ago, Imag­in­ing a Trauma-informed Quak­er Com­mu­ni­ty.

A chatty email newsletter

March 9, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Over the years I’ve noticed var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion break­downs among Friends that have made me wor­ried. It’s often some­thing rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle. For exam­ple, I might be talk­ing to an active Philadel­phia Friend and be star­tled to real­ize they have no idea that a major year­ly meet­ing across the coun­try is break­ing apart. Or some­one will send me an arti­cle bemoan­ing the lack of some­thing that I know already exists.

I’m in this fun­ny posi­tion where I have a quar­ter cen­tu­ry of ran­dom Quak­er fac­toids in my head, have access to great data­bas­es (like instant search­es of Friends Jour­nal’s 60+ years of arti­cles), and have good Googling chops. When I’m in a dis­cus­sion with Friends face-to-face, I find I often have use­ful con­text. Some of it is his­tor­i­cal (I geek out on the Quak­er past) but some of it is just my lived mem­o­ry. I’ve been in and out of Quak­er offices for 27 years now. I’m enter­ing this weird phase of life in which I’ve been a pro­fes­sion­al Quak­er staffer longer than most of my contemporaries.

And ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this weird tal­ent to remem­ber things I read years ear­li­er. When the top­ic of clear­ness com­mit­tees recent­ly came up, I remem­bered that Deb­o­rah Haines had writ­ten a piece about Rachel Davis DuBois in the long-defunct FGCon­nec­tions newslet­ter (yes, groan­er of a name but it was a great pub­li­ca­tion in its hey­day). Thanks to Archive​.org I could resur­face the arti­cle and bring it to the discussions.

And so, I’ve been qui­et­ly been chang­ing the idea of Quak­er Ranter from a clas­sic old-school blog to a dai­ly email newslet­ter. I’ll still col­lect inter­est­ing Quak­er links, as I’ve been doing for years with Quak­erQuak­er. But now I’ll anno­tate them and give them con­text. If there’s a side sto­ry I think is inter­est­ing I’ll tell it. I have a long train com­mute and writ­ing fun and geeky things about Friends makes it interesting.

I think that some­thing like this could help bring Quak­er new­com­ers up to speed. Our insid­er lan­guage and unex­plained (and some­times dat­ed) world­views cre­ate an imped­i­ment for seek­ers. We kind of expect they’ll fig­ure out things that aren’t so obvi­ous. Learn­ing fac­toids and his­to­ries a day at a time can give them some con­text to under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing Sun­day morn­ing. If that’s not enough, I also have an Ask A Quak­er fea­ture where peo­ple new to Friends can ask ques­tions. I’ll be lib­er­al­ly pitch­ing Friends Jour­nal arti­cles and Quak­er­S­peak videos because I think we’re doing some of our best Quak­er media work, but I’m also all about spread­ing the love and will share many oth­er great resources and blogs.

As with all my projects I also hope to get peo­ple con­tribut­ing so it becomes a com­mu­ni­ty water­ing hole. If you want to get involved, the first step is to sign up for the free dai­ly email list. At some point, this will prob­a­bly out­grow the free tier of the email ser­vice I’m using, and I will start to have to pay to send the­see emails out. For those of you with a lit­tle extra to give, Quak­er Ranter Mem­ber­ship is a way to help off­set these costs.

And let your friends know about it! Just send them to quak​er​ran​ter​.org/​e​m​ail to sign up.

Belief (in anything) and belief (in nothing)

February 27, 2018
· Martin Kelley

So Isaac Smith is back with the third install­ment of his grow­ing series, “Dif­fer­ence Between a Gath­ered Meet­ing and a Focused Meet­ing” and this time he’s ref­er­enc­ing two writ­ers on Quak­er mat­ters, Michael J. Sheer­an and yours tru­ly.

In my pre­vi­ous posts, the dis­tinc­tion between gath­ered and focused meet­ings seemed con­nect­ed to one’s reli­gious out­look, and thus relat­ed to the divide between Christ-centered and uni­ver­sal­ist Quak­ers that has bedev­iled our faith for cen­turies. But as Sheer­an and Kel­ley argue, the more fun­da­men­tal divide in the lib­er­al branch of Quak­erism is between those who seek con­tact with the divine and those who don’t.

My post is, as Smith puts it, “near­ly fif­teen years old,” which is about the length of a social gen­er­a­tion. I’m not sure if I’m in a good posi­tion to pon­tif­i­cate about what has and has­n’t changed. Much of my Quak­er work is with inter­est­ing out­liers, either one-or-one or as part of a loose tribe of Friends who pas­sion­ate­ly care about Quak­erism and are will­ing to go into the weeds to under­stand it. I have very lit­tle recent expe­ri­ence with com­mit­tees on local levels.

One use­ful con­cept that I’ve picked up in the last fif­teen years is that of “func­tion­al athe­ism.” This bypass­es a group’s self-stated under­stand­ings of faith to look at how its decision-making process actu­al­ly works. An orga­ni­za­tion that is func­tion­al­ly athe­ist might be full of very devout peo­ple who togeth­er still decide actions in a com­plete­ly sec­u­lar way. I would guess this has become even more the norm among the acronymic soup of nation­al Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions in the last fif­teen years. In that time a lot of bright ideas have come and gone which flashed briefly with the fuel of donor mon­ey but which did­n’t cre­ate a self-sustaining momen­tum to keep them going long term. Think­ing more strate­gi­cal­ly about what peo­ple are seek­ing in their spir­i­tu­al lives might have helped those cast seeds land on more fer­tile grounds.

The Dif­fer­ence Between a Gath­ered Meet­ing and a Focused Meet­ing (3)

Bonus: the 14-year-old com­ments on my piece include some gen­tle whin­ing about Friends Jour­nal between myself and a reg­u­lar read­er at the time. Now that I’m its senior edi­tor I’m sure there remains plen­ty to grum­ble about.

Baby name popularity trendsetters?

May 10, 2016
· Martin Kelley

The most pop­u­lar post on my blog, year after year (and now decade after decade), is a 2005 piece on baby names: Unpop­u­lar Baby Names: Avoid­ing the Jacobs, Emilys and Madis­ons. We used the tech­niques list­ed to aid in our attempt to give our own kids clas­sic names that would­n’t be overused among their peers. The 2015 num­bers are out from the Social Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion. How did we do? The charts below shows the respec­tive rank­ings from 2015 to the year they were born.

theodore

francis

gregory

laura

The names of our two “babies” — Gre­go­ry, 5, and Lau­ra, 4, are both less pop­u­lar now than they were the year we named them. Yea! They’re both in the low 300s – viable names but far from overused.

Fran­cis, now 10, was drop­ping in pop­u­lar­i­ty and drop­ping into the low 600s. With that trend, we actu­al­ly wor­ried about the name becom­ing too unpop­u­lar. But an uptick start­ed in 2010 and became pro­nounced in 2013 when an Argen­tin­ian named Jorge Mario Bergoglio decid­ed to start call­ing him­self Fran­cis. The name is now in the high 400s.

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of our eldest son’s name, Theodore (“I’m Theo!, don’t call me Theodore!”), start­ed off in the low 300s was hold­ing steady with­in a 20-point range for years until around 2009. In 2015 it cracked the top 100. It’s only at 99 but clear­ly some­thing’s hap­pen­ing. Equal­ly dis­turb­ing, “Theo” was­n’t even on the top 1000 until 2010, when it snuck in at posi­tion 918. Since then it’s leap 100 spots a year. It’s cur­rent­ly at 408 with no sign of slowing.

And for those of you look­ing to spot trends: did we just call our names ear­ly? Maybe “Fran­cis” isn’t a slow climb but is about the go shoot­ing for the top 100 in two years time. Maybe “Gre­go­ry” and “Lau­ra” will be all the rage for moth­ers come 2020. Yikes!

The birth of soul

March 4, 2016
· Martin Kelley
Via Wikipedia
Via Wikipedia

I recent­ly lis­tened to Solomon Burke’s 196 album Rock ‘n’ Soul. Def­i­nite­ly worth a lis­ten if like me he’s been off your musi­cal radar. I espe­cial­ly like Wikipedi­a’s account of how con­flicts over brand­ing and church pro­pri­ety led Burke and his record label Atlantic to coin the term “soul music.”

Almost imme­di­ate­ly after sign­ing to Atlantic, Wexler and Burke clashed over his brand­ing and the songs that he would record. Accord­ing to Burke, “Their idea was, we have anoth­er young kid to sing gospel, and we’re going to put him in the blues bag.“As Burke had strug­gled from an ear­ly age with “his attrac­tion to sec­u­lar music on the one hand and his alle­giance to the church on the oth­er,” when he was signed to Atlantic Records he “refused to be clas­si­fied as a rhythm-and-blues singer” due to a per­ceived “stig­ma of pro­fan­i­ty” by the church, and R&B’s rep­u­ta­tion as “the dev­il’s music.”

Burke indi­cat­ed in 2005: “I told them about my spir­i­tu­al back­ground, and what I felt was nec­es­sary, and that I was con­cerned about being labeled rhythm & blues. What kind of songs would they be giv­ing me to sing? Because of my age, and my posi­tion in the church, I was con­cerned about say­ing things that were not prop­er, or that sent the wrong mes­sage. That angered Jer­ry Wexler a lit­tle bit. He said, ‘We’re the great­est blues label in the world! You should be hon­ored to be on this label, and we’ll do every­thing we can – but you have to work with us.’”

To mol­li­fy Burke, it was decid­ed to mar­ket him as a singer of “soul music” after he had con­sult­ed his church brethren and won approval for the term. When a Philadel­phia DJ said to Burke, “You’re singing from your soul and you don’t want to be an R&B singer, so what kind of singer are you going to be?”, Burke shot back: “I want to be a soul singer.” Burke’s sound, which was espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar in the South, was described there as “riv­er deep coun­try fried but­ter­cream soul.” Burke is cred­it­ed with coin­ing the term “soul music,” which he con­firmed in a 1996 interview.

Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning.

March 23, 2013
· Martin Kelley

Over on Twit­ter feed came a tweet (h/t revrevwine):

seo - Google SearchTo trans­late, SEO is “search engine opti­miza­tion,” the often-huckersterish art of trick­ing Google to dis­play your web­site high­er than your com­peti­tors in search results. “Usabil­i­ty” is the catch-all term for mak­ing your web­site easy to nav­i­gate and invit­ing to vis­i­tors. Com­pa­nies with deep pock­ets often want to spend a lot of mon­ey on SEO, when most of the time the most viable long-term solu­tion to rank­ing high with search engines is to pro­vide vis­i­tors with good rea­sons to vis­it your site. What if we applied these prin­ci­ples to our church­es and meet­ing­hous­es and swapped the terms?

Out­reach gets peo­ple to your meetinghouse /
Hos­pi­tal­i­ty keeps peo­ple returning.

A lot of Quak­er meet­ing­hous­es have pret­ty good “nat­ur­al SEO.” Here in the U.S. East Coast, they’re often near a major road in the mid­dle of town. If they’re lucky there are a few his­tor­i­cal mark­ers of notable Quak­ers and if they are real­ly lucky there’s a highly-respected Friends school near­by. All these meet­ings real­ly have to do is put a nice sign out front and table a few town events every year. The rest is cov­ered. Although we do get the occa­sion­al “aren’t you all Amish?” com­ments, we have a much wider rep­u­ta­tion that our num­bers would nec­es­sar­i­ly war­rant. We rank pret­ty high.

But what are the lessons of hos­pi­tal­i­ty we could work on? Do we pro­vide places where spir­i­tu­al seek­ers can both grow per­son­al­ly and engage in the impor­tant ques­tions of the faith in the mod­ern world? Are we invi­ta­tion­al, bring­ing peo­ple into our homes and into our lives for shared meals and conversations?

In my free­lance days when I was hired to work on SEO I ran through a series of sta­tis­ti­cal reports and redesigned some under­per­form­ing pages, but then turned my atten­tion to the clien­t’s con­tent. It was in this realm that my great­est quan­tifi­able suc­cess­es occurred. At the heart of the con­tent work was ask­ing how could the site could more ful­ly engage with first-time vis­i­tors. The “usabil­i­ty con­sid­er­a­tions” on the Wikipedia page on usabil­i­ty could be eas­i­ly adapt­ed as queries:

Who are the users, what do they know, what can they learn? What do users want or need to do? What is the users’ gen­er­al back­ground? What is the users’ con­text for work­ing? What must be left to the machine? Can users eas­i­ly accom­plish intend­ed tasks at their desired speed? How much train­ing do users need? What doc­u­men­ta­tion or oth­er sup­port­ing mate­ri­als are avail­able to help the user?

I’d love to see Friends con­sid­er this more. FGC’s “New Meet­ings Tool­box” has a sec­tion on wel­com­ing new­com­ers. But I’d love to hear more sto­ries about how we’re work­ing on the “usabil­i­ty” of our spir­i­tu­al communities.

Spiritual Biodiversity and Religious Inevitability

August 2, 2011
· Martin Kelley
blank
Emi­grants from the Irish pota­to famine, via Wikipedia

Peo­ple some­times get pret­ty worked up about con­vinc­ing each oth­er of an mat­ter of press­ing impor­tance. We think we have The Answer about The Issue and that if we just repeat our­selves loud enough and often enough the obvi­ous­ness of our posi­tion will win out. It becomes our duty, in fact, to repeat it loud and often. If we hap­pen to wear down the oppo­si­tion so much that they with­draw from our com­pan­ion­ship or fel­low­ship, all the bet­ter, as we’ve achieved a pati­na of uni­ty. Reli­gious lib­er­als are just as prone to this as the conservatives.

These are not the val­ues we hold when talk­ing about the nat­ur­al world. There we talk about bio­di­ver­si­ty. We don’t cheer when a species mal­adapt­ed to the human-driven Anthro­pocene dis­ap­pears into extinc­tion. Just because a plant or ani­mal from the oth­er side of the world has no nat­ur­al preda­tors does­n’t mean our local species should be superseded.

Sci­en­tists tell us that bio­di­ver­si­ty is not just a kind of do-unto-others val­ue that sat­is­fies our sense of nos­tal­gia; hav­ing wide gene pools comes in handy when near-instant adap­ta­tion is need­ed in response to mas­sive habi­tat stress. Monocrops are good for the annu­al har­vest but leave us espe­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble when phy­toph­tho­ra infes­tans comes ashore.

It’s a good thing for dif­fer­ent reli­gious groups to have dif­fer­ent val­ues, both from us us and from one anoth­er. There are pres­sures in today’s cul­ture to lev­el all of our dis­tinc­tives down so that we have no unique iden­ti­ty. Some cheer this monocrop­ping of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for human race. If our reli­gious val­ues are some­how truer or more valu­able than those of oth­er peo­ple, then they will even­tu­al­ly spread them­selves – not by push­ing oth­er bod­ies to be like us, but by attract­ing the mem­bers of the oth­er bod­ies to join with us.

God may have pur­pose in fel­low­ships that act dif­fer­ent­ly that ours. Let us not get too smug about our own inevitabil­i­ty that we for­get to share our­selves with those with whom we differ.