Wonderful video interview of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the Quaker who became an astrophysicist despite years of bullying behavior. She discovered pulsars but got locked out of recognition, including the Nobel Prize, because she was just a “girl.”
Quaker Ranter
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Tag Archives ⇒ Quaker
Quaker institutional values at a historically Quaker school
April 3, 2021
There’s been a lot of talk lately about what it means for an institution to claim a Quaker identity. See for example the great conversation started by Wess Daniels.
Here’s a refreshing take from an independent campus newspaper from historically Quaker Swarthmore College James Sutton:
I do find the rhetorical deployment of Quaker Values in almost every on-campus debate to be disingenuous, to say the least. Call me cynical, but I seriously doubt that most Swatties care much at all about the almost 400-year-old denomination. Outside of having a slightly higher percentage of students from elite Quaker prep schools like Sidwell Friends, it’s a safe bet to say that the vast majority of Swatties have gone their entire lives blissfully untroubled by the Inner Light. How many even know why Quakers are called Quakers?
I remember being on Swarthmore campus one time years ago when a prospective student tour came walking by. I chuckled at the honesty when the tour guide mentioned Quakers but quickly reassured any nervous tour goers that it wasn’t Quaker anymore. As Sutton writes, “It would be entirely possible, even easy, however, for a Swarthmore student to spend all four of their years at the college having essentially no engagement with anything approaching Quakerism.”
As I wrote on Wess’s thread:
A useful metaphor for me is asking how much “Quaker DNA” an institution has. None will be 100%. Some types will on average have more (eg, monthly meetings vs a school) but even w/in a class some will be more in the Quaker stream and this can change over time.
A college will always have multiple influences. The greatest will always be the culture and expectations of higher ed. A school will also have a longer-running reputation and influences arising from its most important academic or sporting programs. Somewhere way down might be an ongoing identity from a historical denominational identity. Some schools court this — Guilford and Earlham come most immediately to mind In the Quaker context — and some have reduced it to a vague and very occasional invocation of “Quaker values.”
High school Quaker writing workshop
November 9, 2020
Friends Journal’s Student Voices Project is up to its eighth year. This year FGC is co-hosting an online writing workshop for Quaker students wanting to participate. This is a really cool opportunity. If you’re a Quaker high schooler or know one, you can sign up here.
Who gets to play the Quaker card?
October 5, 2020
Guillford College archivist Gwen Gosney Erickson has written a guest post on C Wess Daniel’s Remixing Faith newsletter/blog about Quaker values and identity.
I bristle when folks say a particular behavior or action is not “Quakerly.” I ask what is meant by that and often hear, “Well, it lacks integrity.” Rather than using “Quaker-ness” as a measuring stick, what is really meant? Is Quaker the gold standard and based on a list of values drawn from a late twentieth century acronym or assumptions about a singular Quaker ethos? Using language of religious exceptionalism risks creating power dynamics that are unhelpful. Who gets to play the “Quaker card”?
Gwen’s right “Quakerly” is often used as a boundary-setting word. The implication is that the object of the criticism doesn’t have enough Quakerness for their opinion to be valid.
She also talks about how “SPICES” list 1 of testimonies sets up a dynamic of Quaker exceptionalism. There’s nothing particularly Quaker about loving simplicity, peace, etc. As I’ve written before, even a world leader launching a war will could claim they’re seeking the greater peace. If you read any list of Quaker testimonies before the twentieth century, they’re testimonies against specific behavior. It’s harder to justifiy participating in a war if you have a testimony explicitly against war.
The classic Quaker testimonies weren’t enshrined on a tablet brought down from on high. They arose slowly, often organically, as lessons learned by individuals Friends. Over time they became spiritual lessons recognized by the wider Society of Friends and they changed as the collective wisdom of our Society grew. Again from Gwen:
History is the act of studying and engaging with the past through those sources. We bring our own times to that process and use objects and memories (our own and those of others) to inform our understanding of the past. Those stories will likely evolve and change through added information and inclusion of narratives previously unavailable or ignored.
We’ve certainly been bringing in more voices, even if slowly and sometimes really badly. But our reliance on the milquetoast SPICES formulation has short-circuited a review of the behaviors and attitudes that might comprise Quaker values in our age.
Quaker calendar alternatives
September 28, 2020
John Jeremiah Edminster sent me a note about yesterday’s post about the demise of the Scattergood Motto Calendar:
I hadn’t realized that the Scattergood Calendar was ceasing publication. But the Tract Association of Friends continues to publish its calendar in both the pocket version and the wall version, each for $2 per copy and $20 per dozen, and it might be a worthy public service of thee to direct readers to the website, tractassociation.org, so that anyone grieving the demise of the Scattergood Calendar and wondering what to do for the Friends they used to give gift-calendars to might know where else to look.
Is “a bit of quiet” Quaker worship?
August 12, 2020
From Rhiannon Grant:
The phrase ‘outward practice’ raises a more difficult possibility. Do we sometimes risk making the unprogrammed, open, listening space of Quaker worship into an outward ritual – just the kind of ritual early Quakers were rejecting when they threw out the practices of previous generations of Christians and created unprogrammed worship instead – by focusing too much on the fact of silence or sitting still?
https://brigidfoxandbuddha.wordpress.com/2020/08/10/is-a-bit-of-quiet-quaker-worship/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
Quaker education in a pandemic
June 5, 2020
Johan Maurer starts with the recent public controversy over Sidwell Friends but then transverses a long sweep of Quaker school identity debates, including one at a parent-led school coop with which he was involved:
The one I remember most vividly echoed the Westtown debates: how much overt Quakerism is too much for a school that was already attracting non-Quaker families? After listening to some of this debate, Earlham’s Paul Lacey said to me, “Instead of being ‘in the world, but not of it,’ too often we Quakers are of the world, but not in it!”
https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2020/06/quaker-education-in-pandemic.html
The Quaker values of a Quaker school questioned in The Atlantic
May 9, 2020
The elite Sidwell Friends accepting $5 million of emergency Corona small business relief money has been floating in the news for over a week now but this article in The Atlantic hits where it hurts, focusing on the school’s use of “Quaker values” to justify its actions. It namechecks John Woolman and the Fry family, then quotes three prominent academic Friends (David Harrington Watt, Paul Anderson, and Stephen Angell).
The Atlantic A few thoughts: it’s great to see an article on Friends actually go out and interview Friends. The reporter obviously knew that focusing a critique on “Quaker values” would get a reaction from some quarters.
There’s a great conversation about this on a Facebook thread. Paul Anderson says he was selectively quoted and told the reporter that a case could be made that Quaker fiscal responsibility might well preclude using endowment funds for operating expenses.