A nice profile on a Quaker community in Michigan that went full-in in Spiritualism:
As they came west, a number brought Spiritualism with them. A lot of liberal Quakers were very interested in Spiritualism. Battle Creek had a Quaker base, they predominated for a while. They converted to Spiritualism as a body, and Battle Creek became this southwest Michigan center for Spiritualism.
Quakera were among many of rhe early leaders of the Spiritualist movement; while it eventually mostly burned out, a lot of the ideas about authority and spiritual diversity in turn influenced Hicksite Friends.
The Times has a nice profile of the not-dead Pulitzer Prize composer and gay icon. The piece doesn’t mention his Quaker roots (he was born in Richmond, Indiana and raised as a Friend) but an embedded playlist includes “Mary Dyer did hang as a flag,” a piece from his 1976 composition A Quaker Reader.
I don’t know much about Rorem or the extent or ongoingness of his Quaker identity (if anyone wants to share more in the comments that would be great). I keep a list I call “Surprising Unexpected Unlikely Quakers” for names people give me of famous’ish people with Quaker connections. Who’s your favorite unlikely Quaker?
Reader Carl Abbott of Multnomah Meeting in Portand, Oregon, wrote in with a bit more context about the local public school that’s shedding it’s Quaker mascot:
The Franklin High mascot issue was very low profile here in Portland, basically raised and advocated by one person. Individuals in our meeting signed her petition, but the question did not rise to formal consideration ( I think also the case with other area meetings and churches). The question of Native American names used by schools around Oregon HAS been a substantial and difficult public issue, and I suspect that the Portland School Board was looking to avoid a quagmire. I’m supportive of the change, although it seemed to me that there have been much more important things to worry about.
Meanwhile, for your entertainment I dug out this old press release from George Fox University (whose date I can’t read). I do agree that Bruin is better than Foxy George.
It looks to me like the handwriting reads Fall 70 to me. Am I going to be the only one to think that Foxy George is pretty creative in a charmingly obvious way?
It’s written for a tech audience and leans a bit on the dichotomy between old (“It still looks much the same as it did in 1670”) and modern communication but there are some insights that we Friends sometimes take too much for granted:
Social media tends towards the shallow and boastful. That’s not an intuitive fit for the meticulous work of ecumenical accompaniment, nor for a faith that values authenticity and depth. However, Teresa and her team know they need to do more — not despite their beliefs, but because of them.
I also appreciate the comparison between Quaker organization and principles of decentralization found in networks.
Just as in tech, decentralisation — building a more networked approach — is high on Quakers’ agenda. But that journey is perhaps easier for a faith fundamentally opposed to hierarchy. Now, rather than try to hang onto old models, Quakers in Britain are actively (and continuously) checking their power and privilege.
Frances William Browin from the September 15, 1968 Friends Journal.
When I became an editor at Friends Journal in 2011, I inherited an institution with some rather strong opinions. Some of them are sourced from the predictable wellsprings: William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s foundational mid-century style guide and the editorial offices of the Chicago Manual of Style. But some are all our own, logically tested for consistency with Chicago but adapted to Quaker idiosyncrasies.
One of our most invariable (and contested) formats comes from the way we list congregations. Quick aside for non-Quakers: you will often see a Quaker meeting variously named as “Town Monthly Meeting,” “Town Friends Meeting,” “Town Quaker Meeting,” etc. People often have strong opinions about the correct form. Occasionally an author will insist to me that their meeting has an official name (“Springfield Friends Meeting”), used consistently across their publications and business minutes. But after a few minutes with Google I can usually find enough counter-examples (“Springfield Monthly Meeting”) to prove their inconsistency.
To cut through this, Friends Journal uses “Town (State) Meeting” everywhere and always, with specific exceptions only for cases where that doesn’t work — for example, the meeting is named after a street or a tree or isn’t in the town it’s named for (after 300 years identities sometimes get messy). This formatting is unique to Friends Journal—even other Philadelphia-based Quaker stylesheets don’t follow it. We’ve been doing it this distinctively and this consistently for as long as I’ve been reading the magazine. Where does our stubborn naming convention come from?
Fortunately, thanks to Haverford College’s Quaker and Special Collections we have digital archives going back to the mid-1950s. A few months ago I dug into our archives and used keyword searches to see how far back the format goes. Traveling the years back it time it’s held remarkably steady as “Town (State) Meeting” until we get back to the fall of 1962. The October 15 issue doesn’t have consistent meeting listings but it does announce that longtime Friends Journal editor William Hubben was to begin a six-month sabbatical and that Frances Williams Browin was to fill in as acting editor.
It didn’t take her long to make her mark. Friends Journal came out twice a month in the 1960s and the next issue sees a few parentheses unevenly applied to meeting listings. But by the November 15th issue, nineteen meetings are referenced using our familiar format! There’s the “member of Berkeley (Calif.) Meeting” who had just published a pamphlet of Christmas songs for children, an FCNL event featuring skits and a covered-dish supper at “Swarthmore (Pa.) Meeting” and the announcement of a prominent article by “Kenneth E. Boulding, a member of Ann Arbor (Michigan) Meeting.”
I’ve tried to imagine the scene… Browin situated in her new temporary office… going back and forth, forth and back on some listing… then finally surprising herself by shouting “enough!” so loudly she had to apologize to nearby colleagues. At the end of the six months, Hubben came back, but only as a contributing editor, and Browin was named as full editor. Friends Journal board member Elizabeth B Wells wrote a profile of her upon her retirement from that position in 1968:
Her remarks usually made sparks, whether she was expressing an opinion (always positive), exerting pressure (not always gentle), or making a humorous aside (often disturbing). For in her amiable way she can be tart, unexpected, even prejudiced (in the right direction), then as suddenly disarmingly warm and sensitive.
This sounds like the kind of person who would standardize a format with such resolve it would be going strong 55 years later:
She was so entirely committed to putting out the best possible magazine, such a perfectionist, even such a driver, that her closest colleagues often felt that we knew the spirited editor far better than the Quaker lady.
It’s a wonderfully written profile. And today, every time an author rewrites their meeting’s name on a copyedited manuscript I’ve sent them for review, I say a quiet thanks to the driven perfectionist who gives me permission to be “prejudiced in the right direction.” Wells’s profile is a fascinating glimpse into a smart woman of a different era and well worth a read.
And for uber word geeks, yes our Friends Journal style guide is a public document. While parts of its proscriptions go back to the early 1960s, it is very much a living document and we make small changes to it on an almost weekly basis.
In the last few weeks, the fashion segment of the Internet has gone all a‑buzz over new term “Normcore.” Normal, everyday, clothing is apparently showing up in downtown Manhattan — gasp! Like many trendy terms, it’s not really so new: back in the nineties and early oughts, Gap ruled the retail world with posters showing celebrities and artists wearing t‑shirts and jeans available at the local mall store. “Normcore” is just the leading edge of the utterly-predicable 20-year fashion industry pendulum swing.
It also perhaps signals a cultural shift away from snobbery and into embracing roots. One of the most popular posts on the New York Times’s website last year celebrated regional accents (apparently Philadelphians are allowed to talk like Philadelphians again).
An analogue to this fashion trend has been occuring among Friends for a little while now. The “New Plain” discussion have revolved around reclaiming an attitude, not a uniform.
If you read the old Quaker guide books (called “Books of Discipline” then, now more often called “Faith and Practice”), you’ll see that unlike other plain-dressing American groups like the Amish, Quakers didn’t intend their clothes to be a uniform showing group conformity. Instead, plainness is framed in terms of interior motivations. Avoiding fashion trends helped Friends remember that they were all equal before God. It also spoke to our continuing testimony of integrity, in that Friends were to dress the same way in different contexts and so vouchsafe for a single identity.
When I began feeling the tug of a leading toward plainness it was for what I began calling “Sears Plain,” indicating that I wore clothes that I could find in any box store or mall. I developed a low-maintenance approach to fashion that freed up my time from shopping and the morning dressing ritual. Modern plainness can lessen the temptation to show off in clothes and it can reduce the overall wardrobe size and thus reduce our impact on the environment and with exploited labor. But all this is nothing new and it never really disappeared. If you looked around a room of modern Quakers you’ll often see a trend of sartorial boringness; I was simply naming this and putting it in the context of our tradition.
Over time I found that these motivations were more prevalent in the wider culture, especially in the minimalist techie scene. Steve Jobs famously sported a uniform of black turtleneck, jeans, and New Balance sneakers (explained in 2011). In a 2012 profile, Barack Obama talked about limiting his clothes to two colors of suits so that he could free up his decision-making energies on more important issues (I wrote about his fashion in “Plain like Barack”).
Non-celebrities also seem interested in working out their relationship with fashion. My articles on modern plainness have always been a big draw on my blog. While my fellow Quakers are sometimes mildly embarrassed by our historic peculiarities, outsiders often eat this stuff up. They’re looking for what the techies would call “life hacks” that can help them prioritize life essentials. If we can communicate our values in a real way that isn’t propped by appeals to the authority of tradition, then we can reach these seekers.
So now that “Normcore” is appearing in places like Huffington Post , the New York Times and fashion magazines, will Friends be able to talk more about it? Do we still have a collective witness in regards to the materialism and ego-centricity of fashion marketing?
A few weeks ago we were contacted by someone from the St Nicholas Center (http://www.stnicholascenter.org) asking if they could use some photos I had taken of the church my wife is attending, Millville N.J.‘s St Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic. Of course I said yes. But then my correspondent asked if I could take pictures of another church she had heard of: St Nicholas Old Believer’s Church. It’s on the other side of Millville from our St Nick’s, on an ancient road that dead ends in woods. We had to visit.
The Old Believers have a fascinating history. They were Russian Orthodox Christians who refused to comply with liturgical changes mandated by the Patriarch and Czar in the 1650s. As usual, there was a lot of politics involved, with the Czar wanting to cozy up with the Greek Orthodox to ally Russia against the Muslim Ottomans, etc., etc. The theological charge was that the Greek traditions were the standard and Russian differences latter-day innovations to be stamped out (more modern research has found the Russians actually were closer to the older forms, but no matter: what the Czar and Patriarch want, the Czar and Patriarch get). The old practices were banned, beginning hundreds of years of state-sponsored persecution for the “Old Believers.” The survivors scattered to the four corners of the Russian empire and beyond, keeping a low profile wherever they went.
The Old Believers have a fascinating fractured history. Because their priests were killed off in the seventeenth century, they lost their claims of apostolic succession – the idea that there’s an unbroken line of ordination from Jesus Christ himself. Some Old Believers found work-arounds or claimed a few priests were spared but the hardcore among them declared succession over, signaling the end times and the fall of the Church. They became priestless Old Believers – so defensive of the old liturgy that they were willing to lose most of the liturgy. They’ve scattered around the world, often wearing plain dress and living in isolated communities.
The Old Believers church in Millville has no signs, no website, no indication of what it is (a lifelong member of “our” St Nick’s called it mysterious and said he little about it of it). From a few internet references, they appear to be the priestless kind of Old Believers. But it has its own distinctions: apparently one of the greatest iconographers of the twentieth century lived and worshipped there, and when famed Russian political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn visited the U.S. he made a point of speaking at this signless church on a dead end road.
Wow, when I Google myself, the top return is my Google profile, which includes direct links to my some of my media (in this case, business site, blog and LinkedIn profile)
Medium 
