Graham Taylor with a well-cited article on the proto-socialism of early Friends. There’s a bit of anachronistic thinking going on here, which he admits to. But it’s also the case that a lot of Quaker history is viewed through the lens of later Quakers and often ignores what was happening outside of Quakerism at the time. This can lead to bad histories. I’m not sure I buy some of Taylor’s arguments but it’s a good exercise and Fox certainly did talk about economics as part of his call for justice.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ Quaker
Quaker Socialist Society Hope and Optimism
December 1, 2024
December’s Friends Journal is online and looks at “Spiritual Optimism vs. Spiritual Pessimism.” I wrote the opening column this month and explained why I wanted to see Quakers tackle this. It seems to me that hope and pessimism are attitudes that transcend typical religious and political divisions. Pick a topic or dissect a social group and you can usually find among them people who are undaunted by the challenges ahead and others worried to the point of paralysis. Our reactions to Covid these past five years have exposed these fault lines, as is our responses to the recent presidential election. I wrote:
Has there ever been an age in human history in which we could be purely optimistic or purely pessimistic? Quaker founder George Fox wrote that his ministry arose “when all my hopes in [preachers and experienced people] were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do.” He famously found inspiration, guidance, and courage in “one, even Christ Jesus,” who could speak to his condition. What keeps us going today in a world always ready to implode or blossom?
Friends Journal The art of the compromise
November 12, 2024
I very occasionally do a book review for the magazine. My colleague Gail thought I might be interested in this biography of the longest-serving editor of our British counterpart, The Friend, so I reviewed A Friend in Deed: The Life of Henry Stanley Newman.
The part of Henry Stanley Newman’s life that I found most fascinating was his generation’s ability to bend technicalities almost to the breaking point in order to maintain formal unity. As a young man, he rebelled against the stodgy and insular Quakerism of his upbringing and found a way to create a parallel spiritual life based on Evangelical principles. In middle life, established and respected, he faced challenges from a rising young Liberal faction and managed to stay engaged enough to keep them within the fold of mainstream British Quakerism. In the United States, these same shifts toward first evangelical and then liberal theologies resulted in schisms, many of which still divide Friends.
Almost twenty years ago I visited a small Midwestern U.S. yearly meeting that really felt like a family, both in its bonds and its dysfunctions. I liked it. One of the most respected members was gay and at some point in earlier sessions he had been nominated to be the yearly meeting clerk. This was a non-starter for a member church that was also affiliated with an Evangelical yearly meeting. After some back and forth he was was approved as an assistant clerk, a solution everyone could live with. Logically it makes absolutely no sense — if gayness precludes one from one yearly meeting leadership position it should preclude them from any. But the yearly meeting wanted him and found a way to make it work and he cheerfully accepted the logical irony of the situation. (The situation didn’t last and the dual-affiliated meeting eventually had to make a choice and disaffiliate from one of its yearly meetings.)
There’s an impulse toward purity that wouldn’t have allowed these kinds of negotiated compromises. A young Newman, starting Evangelical organizations left and right that were nominally outside of Quaker structure but full of Quakers, would have been disowned. The Midwest yearly meeting would have splintered over the Liberal’s insistence of a clerk status or the Evangelical’s insistence on no status. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly understand purity: sometimes we need to make a stand. But sometimes it’s more important to be a logically inconsistent family than to be alone in our correctness. Henry Stanley Newman’s compromises is an interesting model for us, still.
Miracles with Diane Allen
November 5, 2024
Cropwell Meeting had a nice program on miracles last weekend. Diane is locally famous for natives past a certain age because of her ubiquitous presence in Philly TV back in the day. She gave a great talk. Everyone was hushed and attentive throughout, with gasps Olof astonishment at some of the profiles.
Cropwell hosts Halloween family outreach event again
October 30, 2024
My meeting hosted another Halloween event earlier this week. When we did it in 2022 we arranged to have flyers distributed by the homeowners’ association of development behind us but we missed the October mailing deadline this time. So a few members flyered in the neighborhood and it worked! Someone saw it and shared it on a parent chat for the nearby elementary school. A few further-off people came because of the Facebook event, which frankly surprised me.
A Future Vision of Friends
October 22, 2024
Craig Barnett, in his Transition Quakers blog, talks about the future of Quakerism in the UK. Here’s a snippet but go read the whole thing:
There is likely to be an even larger number of people whose most regular engagement with other Quakers is online, perhaps supplemented by retreats, camps or other in-person events. There will almost certainly be a broad range of Quaker activist groups and networks focussed on particular concerns such as the climate emergency, migration and peace. Alongside this, I anticipate a greater diversity of forms of Quaker practice, belonging and spirituality, with most Friends having a much looser connection to area meetings and Britain Yearly Meeting as a whole. In other words it looks much more like a movement than one monolithic organisation.
I think a lot of this is relevant to Friends in North America and not only because of some shared culture. For better or worse, the internet is decoupling spirituality from geography. Blogs and magazines, podcasts and YouTube channels are all accessible from anywhere. Covid taught us all how to use Zoom and the continued availability of online worship have led isolated Friends (or Friends frustrated by local, in-person options) to worship from anywhere.
I’m intrigued by Craig’s analogy to the organization and of western Buddhism though I think we still need to focus on local worship. Partly because of the internet, people are seeking in-person, live communities but we have to be ready to receive them. Craig talks about the need to provide religious education — to be able to answer what we believe — and support for families and children.
And Who Are Our Friends?
October 4, 2024
The October Friends Journal is out. A little teaser from my opening column:
Are we all just bad Quakers? I don’t think so. I had so many conversations with Friends over the years in which they judged themselves against semi-mythical “real Quakers.” I suspect we often find our greatest Quaker authenticity in the messiness that follows faithfulness. Some of the most fascinating Friends in the past, figures such as Benjamin Lay and Public Universal Friend, were so far ahead of their time that they couldn’t fit into the Quaker mainstream of their day.
The Good Samaritan who stopped to help a wounded traveler was probably made late for whatever appointment he was rushing to. He might have lost business with his detour; he certainly lost money on the supplies he used to treat the wounds and on the money he gave the innkeeper. But he was clear-sighted enough to know that the inward commandment to help his neighbor was more important than any of these worldly concerns.
Donald W McCormick: Relationships in Quaker Meeting
September 26, 2024
Last week I spoke with Friends Journal author Don McCormick. Don’s been a prolific writer for us in recent years. We talked of our experiences of community among modern Friends, especially in different types of meetings, as well as techniques for orienting and welcoming newcomers to Quaker meetings.