Tag Archives ⇒ Quaker

What does normalization mean for Quaker process?

March 5, 2018
· Martin Kelley

The March issue of Friends Jour­nal dropped online last week (and will soon hit mail­box­es) and the first fea­tured arti­cle is from Mike Merryman-Lotze, AFSC’s Mid­dle East Pro­gram direc­tor, and looks at the Pales­tin­ian use of the con­cept of nor­mal­iza­tion. I first came across this term in a Max Carter book review in 2011 and have been want­i­ng to run an arti­cle ever since because it real­ly ques­tions some Quak­er ortho­dox­ies. Mike writes:

So as Quak­ers com­mit­ted to peace and engage­ment with all peo­ple, what should we take from this con­ver­sa­tion? First, we should rec­og­nize that Pales­tini­ans and Israelis are get­ting togeth­er and coop­er­at­ing but on their own terms. One of the key prob­lems with many past people-to-people pro­grams is that they were ini­ti­at­ed and led by out­side actors who imposed their own goals and terms on inter­ac­tions. The nor­mal­iza­tion frame­work pushed for­ward by Pales­tini­ans is a reasser­tion of own­er­ship of the terms of inter­ac­tion by those most impact­ed by the sys­tem­at­ic injus­tice of Israel’s occu­pa­tion and inequality.

I’ve won­dered how the para­dox of nor­mal­iza­tion plays into some of the issues that seem to reg­u­lar­ly stymie Quak­er process. From my intro­duc­to­ry Friends Jour­nal col­umn:

 As Friends, our first instinct has been to think of con­flicts as mis­un­der­stand­ings: if only every­one got to know each oth­er bet­ter, love and coop­er­a­tion would replace fear and con­fu­sion. It’s a charm­ing and some­times true sen­ti­ment, but many Pales­tin­ian activists charge that this process ignores pow­er dif­fer­en­tials and “nor­mal­izes” the sta­tus quo.

(if you have thoughts, feel leave them in the com­ments or reply to the dai­ly email).


When Dialogue Stands in the Way of Peace - Friends Journal

When Dia­logue Stands in the Way of Peace — Friends Journal 

People-to-people pro­grams can cause harm when they don’t address struc­tur­al issues.

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

The Quaker-Methodist Connection

March 2, 2018
· Martin Kelley

The Quaker-Methodist Connection

Dur­ing the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, rela­tions between Quak­ers and Methodists were cool in prin­ci­ple, but rather warmer in prac­tice. John Wes­ley, being the good Angli­can church­man, was high­ly crit­i­cal of the sec­tar­i­an dimen­sions of the Quak­er faith, espe­cial­ly its form of wor­ship, its rejec­tion of the sacra­ments, its qui­etism, and its will­ing accep­tance of women as ministers.

Quakers in evolution

March 1, 2018
· Martin Kelley

UK Friend Craig Bar­nett describes changes in Friends in evo­lu­tion­ary terms. It’s a bit of a “On the one hand/On the oth­er hand” argu­ment that points out the strengths of both Quak­er tra­di­tion and Quak­er inno­va­tion. I want my have my cake and eat it too, to both hon­or the divine and work toward rad­i­cal neigh­bor­li­ness here on Earth using tech­niques boot­strapped on clas­sic Quak­er insights. Craig lays out where we are:

This evo­lu­tion­ary change towards a plu­ral­ist and post-Christian move­ment is not straight­for­ward­ly bet­ter or worse. It has cer­tain­ly been a use­ful adap­ta­tion for enabling many peo­ple to find a home in a spir­i­tu­al­ly wel­com­ing com­mu­ni­ty, while at the same time pro­duc­ing a loss of shared reli­gious expe­ri­ence and language


Evolutionary Quakers

Evo­lu­tion­ary Quakers 

The Quak­er way has changed pro­found­ly over the last five decades. The lib­er­al Quak­erism that was devel­oped by…

transitionquaker.blogspot.com tran​si​tion​quak​er​.blogspot​.com

Getting vs. Feeling Better

March 1, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Rhon­da Pfaltzgraff-Carlson wants us to take the heal­ing pow­er of the Light seri­ous­ly:

I was con­cerned about the under­ly­ing mes­sage being sent. I didn’t want non-Friends to believe that we have a tra­di­tion of silent wor­ship because we’ve found that we can use this time to for­get our prob­lems and bury our dis­com­fort! Indi­rect­ly, it sug­gest­ed that sit­ting in silence is just anoth­er means for feel­ing better.

This reminds me a bit of the recent­ly renewed dis­cus­sions in the Quak­er blo­gos­phere* around Michael Sheer­an’s obser­va­tions in Friends a gen­er­a­tion ago.

Quak­erism: Get­ting Bet­ter vs. Feel­ing Better

*This term isn’t too impos­si­bly 1998, is it?

Namesake of school in latest massacre had Quaker roots

February 27, 2018
· Martin Kelley

When this lat­est school gun mas­sacre took place in a school called Stone­man Dou­glas I only paused at the unusu­al name as I con­tin­ued to read how­ev­er many details of the hor­ror I could stom­ach. But Stone­man Dou­glas was a per­son, an ear­ly envi­ron­men­tal activist who helped raise aware­ness of the Ever­glades as a nat­ur­al trea­sure. She might have got­ten some of that gump­tion and care from her father, a Quak­er from Minnesota:

The fam­i­ly found a com­mu­ni­ty of Quak­er friends in the small town, of which Stone­man Dou­glas wrote, “It may have been a ‘fron­tier town,’ but there was strict tra­di­tion to guide him, the tra­di­tion of ‘Yea and nay,’ the tra­di­tion of plain liv­ing and clear and inde­pen­dent think­ing, and there were fam­i­ly sto­ries to point up the stiff-backed breed. They may have been plain peo­ple but they were colorful.”
 — Read on m.startribune.com/namesake-at-school-of-latest-massacre-was-a-minnesota-native-born-in-1890/475206053/

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.

Gathered vs focused Meeting part 2

February 26, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Isaac Smith is back adding some nuance to his pars­ing of the dif­fer­ences between Quak­er wor­ship experiences:

If you’re swept up in a net, you’re off bal­ance; you don’t have the same cer­tain­ty about your­self and your sur­round­ings as you did before. Part of what it means to be gath­ered is that uncer­tain­ty, that trust in some­thing even if you don’t ful­ly under­stand it.

https://theanarchyoftheranters.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/the-difference-between-a-gathered-meeting-and-a-focused-meeting‑2/