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Could Quakerism be the radical faith?

April 23, 2018
· Martin Kelley

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?

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

Convergent Friends as New Jazz Traditionalist

April 13, 2018
· Martin Kelley

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.

Con­ver­gent Friends as New Jazz Traditionalists

None of us is a volunteer

April 5, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Sam Barnett-Cormack is a pro­lif­ic non-theist British Friend. His lat­est post, Doing It Our­selves, has some thoughts on com­mu­ni­ty dis­cern­ment that I find interesting.

Quak­erism “done right” is not “do it your­self” in either sense… No task is done by one per­son alone; it is always the work and respon­si­bil­i­ty of the com­mu­ni­ty, though we might not always clear­ly see the sup­port and assis­tance we are giv­en. Some would say that we are “upheld in prayer,” a term that does not speak to my expe­ri­ence, but we are cer­tain­ly upheld by the love and nur­ture of our com­mu­ni­ty – unless our com­mu­ni­ty is failing.

Mixing Quakers & Politics

March 19, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Greg Woods is the pri­ma­ry mover behind this Thurs­day’s live pan­el of Quak­er con­gres­sion­al can­di­dates. He’s writ­ten a new post about it, Quak­ers & Pol­i­tics Do Mix (in the 2018 Midterms)

This year’s elec­tion feel dif­fer­ent than pre­vi­ous years. Peo­ple are ready to do some­thing besides just vot­ing. Many are run­ning for office in record num­bers, for exam­ple: Sci­en­tists and Women.Another pop­u­la­tion that is run­ning in, per­haps, record num­bers in 2018: Quakers!

He’s added a lot of inter­est­ing con­tex­tu­al links to arti­cles about the new types of can­di­dates we’re see­ing in the 2018 election.

To make sure you get the lat­est infor­ma­tion on the live pan­el, sign up for the live web pan­el’s Face­book event. And join us at 3pm ET for our live web pan­el. We’ll also be con­tin­u­ing to update the Friends Jour­nal announce­ment page.

Your Hand in Front of Your Face

March 9, 2018
· Martin Kelley

The sec­ond post of a new blog, Mus­ings of a Return­ing Quak­er, was post­ed yes­ter­day. In Your Hand in Front of Your Face, Josh Tal­bot con­nects the Gospel with the need for eco­nom­ic betterment:

Singing along with a hymn does not pay rent. Sit­ting in Silent Wor­ship revi­tal­izes your soul and con­nec­tion to the Light. How­ev­er, it does not lessen the bur­den of need­ing to eat. The ques­tion we must ask our­selves as peo­ple of faith is what can we do in order to bring these poor (lit­er­al­ly) peo­ple back to church. From my per­spec­tive as a Hick­site Friend the answer is sim­ple, to turn to the Quak­er tra­di­tion of activism.

Long­time read­ers will know I strug­gle too with how Friends can those who don’t have the lux­u­ry of Sun­day morn­ing free time. I wrote about this in a Decem­ber 2012 arti­cle in Friends Jour­nal (the only fea­ture I’ve writ­ten since becom­ing senior edi­tor). I was look­ing back to a 11-month peri­od in which I had worked the night shift in my local super­mar­ket. I’m always glad to see a new Quak­er blog and this one is promising.

https://​quak​er​re​turns​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​1​8​/​0​3​/​y​o​u​r​-​h​a​n​d​-​i​n​-​f​r​o​n​t​-​o​f​-​y​o​u​r​-​f​a​c​e​.​h​tml

Weak politics

February 27, 2018
· Martin Kelley

An unsigned post on the Quak­er Lib­er­tar­i­an group blog looks at post­mod­ernism and weak politics. 

As I see it, Quak­ers at their best have been about the work of the for­mer for many years. And post­moder­ni­ty offers a com­ple­men­tary philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal lens to Quak­er faith and prac­tice, even as it chal­lenges our tra­di­tion to the extent that it makes uni­ver­sal claims, builds up its own dom­i­nant struc­tures and nar­ra­tives, and engages in oppres­sion of oth­ers in the name of a greater good

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.