From JP Lund:
The Wilmington Yearly Meeting that emerges will be smaller. It will still be diverse, including a range of views on same gender marriage and Biblical authority. It will consist of meetings that have chosen Christian fellowship over dogma, the Gospel of Love over the letter of the law.
So much to chew on in Johan Maurer’s Decline and persistence, part two. Find a good chair and take the time to read.
Friends theology strips away all irrelevant social distinctions, giving us the potential for radical hospitality, but that requires us to neutralize elitist signals of all kinds with a hunger to taste heaven’s diversity here and now. If it takes a whole new conversion to give us the necessary freedom and emotional range in place of old class anxieties, so be it.
http://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/03/decline-and-persistence-part-two.html
Sometimes I’m remiss at actually sharing articles I’ve worked on as part of my duties as Friends Journal’s editor. It’s especially ironic this week given that one of the most talked-about recent Quaker articles comes from the February FJ issue.
Don McCormick’s piece has a bold title: Can Quakerism Survive? He talks about thr decline that many Friends geoups have been experiening and wonders who it is that might have. vision for twenty-first century Friends.
The article has garnered over eighty comments. The range and depth of that conversation has been humbling as as editor. But this is a good cross-section of visions of Quakerism. An excerpt from McCormick:
Over the past 40 years, I have been part of and seen organizations that had high ideals and did good work but were focused on internal dynamics and paid little attention to threats to their existence. As a result, they went under. I worry that our yearly, quarterly, and monthly meetings will also.
Near the beginning of Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence, he writes “My books are self-exemplifying: the objects themselves embody the ideas written about.” The same could be true of his presentations.
On a recent Tuesday, Friends Journal sponsored me to attend one of Tufte’s one-day workshops. He’s most well-known for his beautiful books on data visualizations but his workshop touched on a number of fascinating topics. “The world is way too interesting to have disciplinary boundaries,” he said at one point as he took us from music to maps to space shuttles to magicians. The range was purposeful. He was teaching us how to think.
I estimated a crowd of maybe 450. A large percentage were low-level corporate types (I overheard one say “I was not expecting that he’d bash PowerPoint so much”; this slacker obviously hadn’t even taken five minutes to skim Tufte’s Wikipedia page). There were smaller mixes of techie, creatives, and design professionals, some of whom were there after fawning over his books for years. Bonus if you go: part of the workshop registration fee is gratis copies of his books!
I have 13 pages of notes. Some highlights for me:
One of my favorite parts of the workshop was an afternoon digression from strict data that he introduced by saying, “It’s time for a heart to heart.” It began with a sermonette on credibility: how to make yourself accountable and just other’s arguments.
Then he talked about how to respond when someone challenges your work. I could tell there must be a long list of personal stories informing this part of the workshop – lessons learned, yes, but surely opportunities lost too. Tufte told us it was only natural to respond in defensiveness and anger and counseled us to not be too quick to dismiss critique. You’ve got to do the hard work to see whether your challenger might be correct.
He reminded us that when we’re in a room full of peers, everyone present has been filtered and selected over the years. You should assume the room will be just as smart as you are. “How dare you think your motives are better than those of your colleagues!” he thundered at an emotional crescendo. He admitted that this self-doubt is a hard posture to adopt. He’s polled public figures he respects and even the thickest-skinned are stung by challenge.
He said he had learned to back off, go slow, and contemplate when he’s challenged. Just when I thought he had found some super-human ability to rationally consider things, he told us it could took him three to five years to really accept the validity of dissenting views.
This was a much-needed sermon for me and I nodded along along. As someone who professionally amplifies opinion, I’m often in the middle of people in debate (I’ve been an actor in these conflicts in the past, though these days I generally play a role somewhere between an agent and mediator). It’s good to see intellectual debate as a process and to remember that it can take years. “This concludes the therapeutic portion of today’s course”, he concluded, before going back to visualizations.
He ended by showing us timeless first-editions of beautiful scientific works by Galileo and Euclid. He felt a genuine appreciation of being part of an intellectual tradition. He was a master and for this day we in the audience were his apprentices. “In life we need tools that last forever and give us clear leverage in clear thinking.”
Update: apparently some number of data visualization people have disliked his workshops. What I found fascinatingly wide-ranging they found rambling. Perhaps Tufte has tightened his presentation or I caught him on a good day. More likely, I think they came looking for a more technical discussion of data visualization and was surprised that Tufte focused so much on critical thinking and communication skills. I have a particular soft spot for quirky and opinionated people who don’t follow scripts and Tufte’s detours all made a certain sense to me. But then I’m a philosophy major turned do-gooder writer/publisher. Your mileage may vary.
I’ve just signed up for Beacon Hill’s Friends House’s Quaker Studies class on “Moodle, Technique / Technology” that begins First Month 12.
An educator F/friend of mine has gushed on about Moodle, the open
source education system and I have to admit it’s always looked intriguing. I’ve taught a
number of real-world Quakerism classes
and I’ve wondered whether online courses could help connect Friends and
seekers isolated by distance or theology. I’ve been wanting to try out
one of Beacon Hill’s online classes for awhile.
From the description:
Is online teaching new to you?
Don’t know where to start?
We’ll
begin with the simplest interactive course:
a “welcome to the class” section with a reading and one forum. We’ll
talk about technology: how settings change
the forum interface; but we’ll also discuss teaching technique: how
to present introductory material to students
who may have a wide range of experience and expectations.Over the 10
weeks, we’ll cover: introducing the moodle environment; chats; forums;
choices and surveys; lessons; assignments; databases; wikis; quizzes.You will have your own lesson space to explore all these tools and will
be expected to look at each other’s work and react to it. By March we
should all be ready to design and offer creative Moodle courses of our
own.
Classes only cost $25. You can find out more about the Beacon Hill’s Moodle online class and all their Quaker Studies classes. If anyone would be interested in some sort of QuakerQuaker-sponsored classes, let me know. We’ve got a lot of well-qualified Quaker teachers in the network and a lot of isolated Friends wanting to learn more.
If you cycle through my last few months of comments, you’ll see that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about who “we” Friends are and who we serve and the consequent question of why we organize into local meetings, national affiliations, blogs, etc.
Essential to this thinking has been Jeanne B’s Social Class and Quakers blog. There are many ways to tease out the way culture and faith work to reinforce and sabotage one another, but class is a good one. If you travel from one theological brand of Friends to another, from one cultural zone to another (e.g, urban vs ex-urban vs rural) you’ll see marked culture differences. Just take a look at the potluck array if you doubt me. Jeanne talks about the urban liberal Quaker stigma against Cool Whip and a great link she turned me on to talks about some of the ways the alterna-lefty culture can unwittingly separate itself from potential allies in social change over tofu (update: more recent work from this organization can be found at classism.org).
Since falling out of the rarefied world of professional Quakerism a year ago, I’ve become more local. I live in a small, largely agricultural town in rural South Jersey roughly equidistant from the region’s skyscraper metropoli (I don’t give its name for privacy reasons) and residents range from multi-generational families to Mexican farmworkers to people who got in trouble up north in NYC and are looking for a quieter place to come clean. I don’t see Quakers in my day-to-day life anymore but I do interact with a more representative sampling of America, people who are all trying to get somewhere other than where they are. Jesus would have been here. Fox would have preached here. But what do modern liberal Friends have to say about this world? As Bill Samuel wrote on Jeanne’s blog issues of safety-net public assistance that seem like do-gooder causes for most well-off liberal Friends are matters of personal practicality for more economically diverse religious bodies (the child care program that President Bush vetoed last month is the same one that let me take my fevered two year old to the doctor last Friday).
Last First Day I heard a good orthodox piece of Quaker ministry couched in a learned language, all talk of justification versus sanctification, with a bit of insider Quaker acronyms thrown in for good effect. I love the fellow who gave the message and I appreciated his ministry. But the whole time I wondered how this would sound to people I know now, like the friendly but hot-tempered Puerto Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in federal prison, now working two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and trying to stay out of trouble. How does the theory of our theology fit into a code of conduct that doesn’t start off assuming middle class norms. What do our tofu covered dishes and vanilla soy chai’s (I’m so addicted) have to do with living under Christ’s instruction? And just which FGC outreach pamphlet should I be handing my new friend?
Enough for now. More soon.
I was given permission to pass along this data from the FGC-sponsored Youth Ministry Consultation that took place Third Month. A number of goals and projects had been brainstormed beforehand. The thirty-or-so participants at the Consultation were each given ten stars, which they were asked to put next to the projects they thought should be pursued. Every star acted as a vote that there was one person interested in that topic. The stars were coded to indicate the age range of the voter: High-Schooler, Adult Young Friend (18 – 37 years old) and older Friends.
 |
| One of the “stars” charts at the consultation |
Being the information design geek, I converted the resultant votes to into qualities and colors and put them into a chart showing interest level. Projects that received no votes from a particular age range are labeled “none,” for no interest; 2 – 3 stars is “weak” interest and so forth, up to “HOT” which are projects which received over 7 stars from an age group.
As an example, take “develop spirituality.” Seven adult young Friends (aged 18 – 37) put a star down for this, indicating they thought it was something FGC should promote, hence “strong” (bright red) interest from this age group. No Friend over forty used one of their stars to indicate interest in this work, indicating that none of them thought FGC should be promoting spiritual development. Here are the results:
| High-School Voters | YAF Voters | Older Adult Voters | |||||||
Expecially for Adult Young Friends | |||||||||
| Community | weak | strong | weak | ||||||
| Develop spirituality | none | strong | none | ||||||
| Outreach & how to explain our faith | none | strong | weak | ||||||
| Critical mass at MM, QM, YM | none | weak | strong | ||||||
| Mentoring by older Friends | none | strong | none | ||||||
| Mentoring to younger Friends | none | strong | none | ||||||
| Mentoring to older Friends: | none | strong | none | ||||||
| Help with transitions | none | *HOT* | weak | ||||||
| Advertising programs | none | weak | none | ||||||
| Suggestions: | |||||||||
| Traveling Ministries for AYF | none | lukew | weak | ||||||
| Groups throughout the year for support | none | lukew | weak | ||||||
| Support for AYF groups at the YM levels | none | weak | weak | ||||||
| Database to help isolated friends | none | none | none | ||||||
| Clearness/discernment process: | |||||||||
| For HS to College | none | lukew | none | ||||||
| For work transitions | none | weak | none | ||||||
| For relationships | none | weak | none | ||||||
| For parenthood | none | weak | weak | ||||||
| Intergenerational Spiritual Conversations | |||||||||
| About Vital Friends Issues | none | lukew | none | ||||||
| Vision of Quakerism in 50 years | none | lukew | weak | ||||||
| Financial support for AYF | weak | *HOT* | lukew | ||||||
| Retreats for youth workers | none | none | weak | ||||||
| Materials specifically designed for AYF, | none | none | none | ||||||
| General Questions: | |||||||||
| How do we handle the broad age span? | none | weak | none | ||||||
| How do we tap the energy and passion of this group MMs, YMs & FGC? | none | lukew | strong | ||||||
| How do we meet the needs without separating AYF from larger community? | none | lukew | none | ||||||
| How do we sustain community when we only meet once a year? | none | lukew | weak | ||||||
Especially for High Schoolers | |||||||||
| Needs: | |||||||||
| Adults who are better prepared to work with them… | weak | lukew | strong | ||||||
| FAP�s that have self confidence | none | none | weak | ||||||
| Help with discernment process around college | none | none | none | ||||||
| Help with disc: C‑O | none | none | weak | ||||||
| Help with discernment around life choices | none | none | weak | ||||||
| Discernment questions: #3, #4, & #5: | none | weak | strong | ||||||
| Building community | weak | weak | weak | ||||||
| Networking | weak | none | none | ||||||
| Bible study, RE curriculum | none | none | weak | ||||||
| Training how one person can have impact | none | none | none | ||||||
| Training on how to develop group dialogs | weak | none | weak | ||||||
| Help to get more teens involved | weak | none | lukew | ||||||
| Programming help | none | none | none | ||||||
| Leadership Development | weak | weak | weak | ||||||
| Suggestions: | |||||||||
| Youth newsletter | lukew | weak | none | ||||||
| Email forum | lukew | weak | none | ||||||
| Email data base | none | weak | none | ||||||
| Event b’ween Young Quakes and Gathering | weak | none | none | ||||||
| Youth exchange | weak | none | none | ||||||
| Programs to facilitate rites of passage | weak | none | none | ||||||
Things Younger Friends wanted more than Older Friends:
In order by AYF popularity:
Things Older Friends wanted more than Younger Friends:
Things no one particularly cared about:
Disclaimer
I should note that this was not a scientific survey. Though the organizers of the Consultation tried hard and the participants were surprisingly diverse for an collection like this, they weren’t representative. There were only four high school participants and I didn’t adjust their votes: “lukewarm” support from them should really be relabled “strong” support.
While this is a small sample size, this is one of the few recent surveys of it type in FGC Quakerism and it bears close study. It confirms a lot of what I’ve been saying all these years (yea!, I’m not crazy) and echoes what I hear a lot of high school and twenty-something Friends talking about. Take it for what its worth!
Related: