Tag Archives ⇒ set

Your Hand in Front of Your Face

March 9, 2018
· Martin Kelley

The sec­ond post of a new blog, Mus­ings of a Return­ing Quak­er, was post­ed yes­ter­day. In Your Hand in Front of Your Face, Josh Tal­bot con­nects the Gospel with the need for eco­nom­ic betterment:

Singing along with a hymn does not pay rent. Sit­ting in Silent Wor­ship revi­tal­izes your soul and con­nec­tion to the Light. How­ev­er, it does not lessen the bur­den of need­ing to eat. The ques­tion we must ask our­selves as peo­ple of faith is what can we do in order to bring these poor (lit­er­al­ly) peo­ple back to church. From my per­spec­tive as a Hick­site Friend the answer is sim­ple, to turn to the Quak­er tra­di­tion of activism.

Long­time read­ers will know I strug­gle too with how Friends can those who don’t have the lux­u­ry of Sun­day morn­ing free time. I wrote about this in a Decem­ber 2012 arti­cle in Friends Jour­nal (the only fea­ture I’ve writ­ten since becom­ing senior edi­tor). I was look­ing back to a 11-month peri­od in which I had worked the night shift in my local super­mar­ket. I’m always glad to see a new Quak­er blog and this one is promising.

https://​quak​er​re​turns​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​1​8​/​0​3​/​y​o​u​r​-​h​a​n​d​-​i​n​-​f​r​o​n​t​-​o​f​-​y​o​u​r​-​f​a​c​e​.​h​tml

March 4, 2018
· Martin Kelley

The Lord showed me, so that I did see clear­ly, that he did not dwell in these tem­ples which men had com­mand­ed and set up, but in people’s hearts … his peo­ple were his tem­ple, and he dwelt in them.

— George Fox

Breath of the Ancestors

February 26, 2018
· Martin Kelley

When I think of Friends in Africa, I gen­er­al­ly pic­ture the large East African year­ly meet­ings in Kenya and Ugan­da which trace their begin­nings to three evan­gel­i­cal Friends who arrived in Kenya in 1902 and set up a mis­sion in Kaimosi.

In this mon­th’s Friends Jour­nal Paul Rick­etts pro­files a small­er Quak­er out­post on the Atlantic coast in Ghana. A group of Amer­i­cans trav­eled there last year as a del­e­ga­tion of the Fel­low­ship of Friends of African Descent.

Ghana was also the depar­ture point of mil­lions of enslaved Africans head­ed toward death and mis­ery in the West­ern Hemi­sphere. Paul takes us to infa­mous Elmi­na Cas­tle, where the ships were loaded with chained human car­go. I always enjoy sto­ries of Quak­er inter­vis­i­ta­tion but this one is espe­cial­ly poignant.


Breath of the Ancestors - Friends Journal

Breath of the Ances­tors — Friends Journal 

The Fel­low­ship of Friends of African Descent trav­els to Ghana’s Hill House Meeting.

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Essential Mac Apps 2017

November 1, 2017
· Martin Kelley

Oh dear: a few weeks ago Wess Daniels start­ed a Twit­ter dis­cus­sion about the new Mac app Card­hop. In the thread he asked me about oth­er apps which apps I find essen­tial. I thought I’d type up some­thing in ten min­utes but then the draft post kept grow­ing. I’m sure I still missed some. I guess I didn’t real­ize how par­tic­u­lar I am about my com­put­ing environment. 🙂

Bartender

Okay, maybe it’s a bit OCD but I hate clut­tered Mac menubars run­ning along the top of my screen. This app was just rebuilt for High Sier­ra and is an essen­tial tool. I have most every­thing hid­den and have set up a key­board short­cut (the little-used right “option” key) to tog­gle the full menubar icon set.

Fantastical

This is my favorite cal­en­dar app. It sits in the menubar, ready to give a beau­ti­ful agen­da view with just a sin­gle tap. It can open up to a full view. Man­age cal­en­dars is easy and the nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing is suburb.

Cardhop

Just released, this is Fantastical’s newest cousin, an app for man­ag­ing con­tacts from Flex­ibits. It works with what­ev­er you have set up for con­tacts on your Mac (I use Google but iCloud is fine too). Giv­en Flexibit’s track record, and Cardhop’s resem­blance to the dis­con­tin­ued Cobook, this is like­ly to be a win­ner for me.

Favioconographer

I’ve been a Chrome user since the week it debuted but late­ly I’ve been try­ing to switch to Safari, want­i­ng its supe­ri­or bat­tery man­age­ment and sync­ing of book­marks and tabs with iOS. Many of Safari’s annoy­ances have lessoned as Apple itin­er­at­ed with each release. There are enough exten­sions now that I can get by. I am, though, one of those weird peo­ple whom John Gru­ber iden­ti­fied: wannabee Safari users who real­ly like Fav­i­cons in tabs. For­tu­nate­ly, Fav­i­cono­g­ra­ph­er has come along. There are occa­sion­al odd­i­ties (float­ing icons, icons that don’t match site) but over­all it improves the Safari expe­ri­ence enough to make it a win over Chrome.

1Blocker for Mac

Uses the built-in con­tent fil­ter­ing sys­tem built into Mac Safari. Good sync­ing with the iOS app. “Con­tent fil­ter­ing” (aka block­ing) has become an impor­tant secu­ri­ty con­cern and let’s face it: the web runs so much bet­ter with­out all the crap that some sites throw in along with their con­tent. You can whitelist sites that respect read­ers. Hon­or­able men­tion in Chrome or as an alter­na­tive for Safari is uBlock Ori­gin, a great block­er (and dis­tinct from stan­dard uBlock, which I don’t recommend).

Karabiner-Elements

Lets you remap the gen­er­al­ly use­less Caps Lock key. I have it mapped Brett-Terpstra style so that a sin­gle click opens Spot­light search and a hold and click acts as a hyper key (imag­ine a shift key that you can use for any keystroke).

BetterTouchTool

Remap keys and key com­bi­na­tions. With Kara­bin­er, I can use it to have Capslock‑C open a par­tic­u­lar app, for instance.

Tunnelbear

I used to think VPNs were a lux­u­ry but with peo­ple hack­ing in on pub­lic Wi-Fi accounts and the loss of pri­va­cy, I’ve signed up for this easy-to-use VPN ser­vice. One account can pow­er mul­ti­ple devices so my lap­top and phone are secured.

Evernote

It’s been around for years. I cur­rent­ly have 13,000 notes stored in Ever­note, includ­ing every issue of the mag­a­zine I work for going back to the mid-1950s. There was a time a few years ago when I was wor­ried for Ever­note, as it kept chas­ing quirky side projects as its main app got bug­gi­er and bug­gi­er. But they’ve had a shake-up, ditched the dis­trac­tions and have built the ser­vice back up. Most of my projects are orga­nized with Evernote.

Ulysses

There are a gazil­lion writ­ing apps out there that com­bine Mark­down writ­ing syn­tax with min­i­mal­ist inter­faces (Bear, IaWriter, Byword) but Ulysses has edged its way to being my favorite, with quick sync­ing and abil­i­ty to post direct­ly to WordPress.

Todoist

There are also a gazil­lion task man­agers. Todoist does a good job of keep­ing projects that need due dates in order.

1Password

You should be using a pass­word man­ag­er. Repeat: you should be using a pass­word man­ag­er. 1Password is rock sol­id. They’ve recent­ly changed their eco­nom­ic mod­el and strong­ly favor sub­scrip­tion accounts. While I’ve tried to lim­it just how many auto-pulling sub­scrip­tions I have, I under­stand the ratio­nale and have switched.

Airmail

A great email app for Mac and iOS that can dis­play and sort your Gmail accounts (and oth­ers too). Almost too many options if you’re the kind to fid­dle with that sort of thing but easy to get start­ed and great with just the defaults.

 

Google and Apple and clouds

The Big‑G should get a shoutout: it pow­ers the data­bas­es for my email, cal­en­dar, con­tacts, and pho­tos. All my hard­ware has migrat­ed over to Apple, helped in large part by the open­ing up of its ecosys­tem to third-party apps.

What’s also use­ful to note is that all of the data-storing ser­vices are cloud based. If my phone or lap­top dis­ap­peared, I could bor­row a new one and be up to speed almost imme­di­ate­ly. Since many of these apps run on data­bas­es run by Google, I can also switch apps or even have mul­ti­ple apps access­ing the same infor­ma­tion for dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es. There’s a real free­dom to the app ecosys­tem these days.

The demise of online subcultures?

March 31, 2017
· Martin Kelley

An inter­est­ing pro­file of a niche com­mu­ni­ty affect­ed by the shift of atten­tion from community-led sites to Face­book, “How Face­book – the Wal-Mart of the inter­net – dis­man­tled online sub­cul­tures.”

Over time, these chal­lenges to the BME com­mu­ni­ty became increas­ing­ly prob­lem­at­ic. Mem­bers delet­ed accounts or stopped post­ing. By 2015, the main com­mu­ni­ty forum – which used to have hun­dreds of posts a day – went with­out a sin­gle com­ment for over six months.

Hav­ing pre­dict­ed many of the web’s func­tions and fea­tures, BME failed to antic­i­pate its own demise.

It’s def­i­nite­ly some­thing I’ve seen in my niche world of Quak­ers. I start­ed Quak­erQuak­er as an inde­pen­dent site in part because I didn’t want Google and Face­book and Beliefnet to deter­mine who we are. There’s the obvi­ous prob­lems — Beliefnet hir­ing a pro­gram­mer to make a “What Reli­gion Are You?” test based on a few books picked up the library one afternoon.

But there’s also more sub­tle prob­lems. On Face­book any­one can start or join a group and start talk­ing author­i­ta­tive­ly about Quak­ers with­out actu­al­ly being an active com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber. I can think of a num­ber of online char­ac­ters who had nev­er even vis­it­ing a Friends meet­ing or church.

Our tra­di­tion built up ways of defin­ing our spokes­peo­ple though the prac­tices of record­ed min­is­ters and elders, and of clar­i­fy­ing shared beliefs though doc­u­ments like Faith and Prac­tice. I’ll be the first to argue that this process has pro­duced mixed results. But if it is to be adapt­ed or reformed, I’d like the work to be done by us in a thought­ful, inclu­sive man­ner. Instead, the form of our dis­cus­sions are now invis­i­bly imposed by an out­side algo­rithm that is opti­mized for obses­sive engage­ment and adver­tis­ing deliv­ery. Face­book process is not Quak­er process, yet it is large­ly what we use when we talk about Quak­ers out­side of Sun­day morning.

I think Face­book has helped alter­na­tive com­mu­ni­ties form. I’m grate­ful for the pop-up com­mu­ni­ties of inter­est I’m part of. And there are sites with more user gen­er­at­ed con­tent like Wikipedia and Red­dit that hold an inter­est­ing middle-ground and where infor­ma­tion is gen­er­al­ly more accu­rate. But there’s still a crit­i­cal role for self-organized inde­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tions, a niche that I think is con­tin­u­ing to be over­shad­owed in our cur­rent atten­tion ecosystem.


How Facebook – the Wal-Mart of the internet – dismantled online subcultures

How Face­book – the Wal-Mart of the inter­net – dis­man­tled online subcultures 

Even though Face­book claims to be a glob­al com­mu­ni­ty, its rise has come at the expense of online…

The Conversation The Conversation 

Wheat planting at Howell’s Living History Farm

September 27, 2016
· Martin Kelley

We’ve got­ten into the habit of vis­it­ing How­ell’s Liv­ing His­to­ry Farm up in Mer­cer Coun­ty, N.J., a few times a year as part of home­school­er group trips. In the past, we’ve cut ice, tapped trees for maple syrup, and seen the sheep shear­ing and card­ing. Today we saw the var­i­ous stages of wheat – from plant­i­ng, to har­vest­ing, thresh­ing, win­now­ing, grind­ing, and bak­ing. I love that there’s such a wide vocab­u­lary of spe­cif­ic lan­guage for all this – words I bare­ly know out­side of bib­li­cal para­bles (“Oh wheat from chaff!”) and that there’s great vin­tage machin­ery (How­ell’s oper­a­tions are set around the turn of the twen­ti­eth century).

Grind­ing the wheat 
I just love the let­ter­ing on the bot­tom of the grinder 
Gre­go­ry on the crank 
Fran­cis’s turn 
A horse- or steam-powered thresh­er had great lettering 
Anoth­er piece of equip­ment had a great font. 
Detail of the grinder 
Stove in the kitchen 
In the kitchen we made bread 
Fields around the farm. 
Wheat. This is a spe­cial kind of spiked wheat that dis­cour­ages deer. 
Hors­es com­ing back from the fresh­ly plowed field. 

The Quaker Wars?

June 29, 2016
· Martin Kelley

Over on Quo­ra, a ques­tion that is more fas­ci­nat­ing than it might at first appear: What wars in his­to­ry were fought in the name of Quak­erism (Soci­ety of Friends)?:

This ques­tion is nei­ther sar­cas­tic nor rhetoric. As many peo­ple insist that vio­lence and atroc­i­ties are an inher­ent part of reli­gions, that reli­gions would cause wars, I real­ly want to know  if that is the truth. Per­son­al­ly I believe reli­gions can be peace­ful, such as in the cas­es of the Quak­ers and the Baha’i, but I might  be wrong. 

The obvi­ous answer should be “none.” Quak­ers are well-known as paci­fists (fun fact: fake can­non used to deceive the ene­my into think­ing an army is more for­ti­fied than it actu­al­ly is are called “Quak­er guns.”) Indi­vid­ual Quak­ers have rarely been quite as unit­ed around the peace tes­ti­mo­ny as our rep­u­ta­tion would sug­gest, but as a group it’s true we’ve nev­er called for a war. I can’t think of any mil­i­tary skir­mish or bat­tle waged to ral­ly­ing cries of “Remem­ber the Quakers!”

Quaker guns at Manassas Junction, 1862. Via Wikimedia.
Quak­er guns at Man­as­sas Junc­tion, 1862. Via Wiki­me­dia.

And yet: all of mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion has been shaped by war. Our polit­i­cal bound­aries, our reli­gions, our demo­graph­ic make-up – even the lan­guages we speak are all rem­nants of long-ago bat­tles. One of the most influ­en­tial Quak­er thinkers, the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry min­is­ter John Wool­man, con­stant­ly remind­ed his brethren to con­sid­er those lux­u­ries that are the fruit of war and slav­ery. When we broad­en the scope like this, we’ve been involved in quite a few wars.

We like to remem­ber how William Penn found­ed the colony of Penn­syl­va­nia as a reli­gious refuge. But the king of Eng­land held Euro­pean title to the mid-Atlantic seaboard because of region­al wars with the Dutch and Swedes (and lat­er held onto it only after a much larg­er war with the Cana­di­an French settlements).

The king’s grant of “Penn’s Woods” was the set­tle­ment of a very large war debt owed to Penn’s father, a wealthy admi­ral. The senior William Penn was some­thing of a scoundrel, play­ing off both sides in ever-shifting royalist/Roundhead see­saw of pow­er. When the musi­cal chairs were over he was on the side of the win­ner, who owed him and lat­er his son. The admi­ral’s longest-lasting accom­plish­ment was dis­obey­ing orders and cap­tur­ing Jamaica for the British (Bob Mar­ley sang his songs of oppres­sion and injus­tice in Eng­lish because of Sir William).

By most accounts, William Penn the younger was fair and also bought the land from local Lenape nations. Most­ly for­got­ten is that the Lenape and Susque­han­nock pop­u­la­tion had been dev­as­tat­ed in a recent region­al war against the Iro­quois over access to beaver-trapping ter­ri­to­ries. They were now sub­ject nations to the Iro­quois Con­fed­er­a­cy, which skill­ful­ly played glob­al pol­i­tics by keep­ing the Eng­lish and French colo­nial empires in enough strate­gic ten­sion that both left the Iro­quois home­land alone. It was in the Iro­quois’s best inter­est to have anoth­er British colony on their south­ern flank and who would make a bet­ter buffer than these ide­al­is­tic paci­fists? The Lenape land reim­burse­ment was sec­ondary con­sid­er­a­tion to con­ti­nen­tal pol­i­tics from their per­spec­tive. (One could eas­i­ly make a case that the bio­log­i­cal geno­cide of indige­nous Amer­i­ca by dis­eases brought over by uncar­ing colonists was also a form of war.)

 

The thou­sands of acres Penn deed­ed to his fel­low Quak­ers were thus the fruits of at least four sets of wars: colo­nial wars over Euro­pean claims to the Delaware Val­ley; debt-fueled Eng­lish civ­il wars; Eng­lish wars against Span­ish Caribbean colonies, and Native Amer­i­can wars fought over access to com­mer­cial resources. Much of orig­i­nal Quak­er wealth in suc­ceed­ing gen­er­a­tions is indebt­ed to the huge land trans­fer in the 1680s, either direct­ly (we still hold some valu­able real estate) or indi­rect­ly (the real estate’s sale could be fun­neled into promis­ing businesses).

Not all of the fruits of war were sec­ond­hand and coin­ci­den­tal to Friends them­selves. Many wealthy Friends in the mid-Atlantic colonies had slaves who did much of the back­break­ing work of clear­ing fields and build­ing hous­es. Many of those oppressed souls were put into bondage in Africa as pris­on­ers of war (John Wool­man would prob­a­bly point out that slav­ery itself is a form of war). That quaint old brick meet­ing­house set back on a flower-covered field? It was prob­a­bly built at least in part by enslaved hands.

Today, it’s impos­si­ble to step free of war. Most of our hous­es are set on land once owned by oth­ers. Our com­put­ers and cell phones have com­po­nents mined in war zones. Our lights and cars are pow­ered by fos­sil fuels. And even with solar pan­els and elec­tric cars, the infra­struc­ture of the dai­ly liv­ing of most Amer­i­cans is still based on extrac­tion and con­trol of resources.

This is not to say we can’t con­tin­ue to work for a world free of war. But it seems impor­tant to be clear-eyed and acknowl­edge the debts we have.

What do you love about your Quaker space?

April 29, 2016
· Martin Kelley

We’re extend­ing the dead­line for the August issue on Quak­er Spaces. We’ve got  some real­ly inter­est arti­cles com­ing in – espe­cial­ly geeky things in archi­tec­ture and the the­ol­o­gy of our clas­sic meetinghouses.

So far our prospec­tive pieces are  weight­ed toward East Coast and clas­sic meet­ing­house archi­tec­ture. I’d love to see pieces on non-traditional wor­ship spaces. I know there new­ly purpose-built meet­ing­hous­es, adap­ta­tions of pre-existing struc­tures, and new takes on the Quak­er impulse to not be churchy. And wor­ship is where we’re gath­ered, not nec­es­sar­i­ly where we’re mort­gaged: tell us about your the rent­ed library room, the chairs set up on the beach, the room in the prison wor­ship group…

Sub­mis­sion guide­lines are at friend​sjour​nal​.org/​s​u​b​m​i​s​s​i​ons. The new dead­line is Mon­day, May 16. My last post about this issue is here.

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