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From concern to action in a few short months

July 1, 2015
· Martin Kelley

rooftop3A grow­ing list of sto­ries is sug­gest­ing that black church­es in the South are being tar­get­ed for arson once again (although one of the more pub­li­cized cas­es seems to be lightning-related). This was a big con­cern in the mid-1990s, a time when a Quak­er pro­gram stepped up to give Friends the chance to trav­el to the South to help rebuild. From a 1996 Friends Jour­nal edi­to­r­i­al:

Some­times a news arti­cle touch­es the heart and moves peo­ple to reach out to one anoth­er in unex­pect­ed ways. So it was this win­ter when the Wash­ing­ton Post pub­lished a piece on the rash of fires that have destroyed black church­es in the South in recent months… When Friend Harold B. Con­fer, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Wash­ing­ton Quak­er Work­camps, saw the arti­cle, he decid­ed to do some­thing about it. After a series of phone calls, he and two col­leagues accept­ed an invi­ta­tion to trav­el to west­ern Alaba­ma and see the fire dam­age for them­selves. They were warm­ly received by the pas­tors and con­gre­ga­tions of the three Greene Coun­ty church­es. Upon their return, they set to work on a plan.

I’m not sure whether Con­fer­’s plan is the right tem­plate to fol­low this time, but it’s a great sto­ry because it shows the impor­tance of hav­ing a strong grass­roots Quak­er ecosys­tem. I don’t believe the Wash­ing­ton Quak­er Work­camps were ever a par­tic­u­lar­ly well-funded project. But by 1996 they had been run­ning for ten years and had built up cred­i­bil­i­ty, a fol­low­ing, and the abil­i­ty to cross cul­tur­al lines in the name of ser­vice. The small­er orga­ni­za­tion­al size meant that a news­pa­per arti­cle could prompt a flur­ry of phone calls and vis­its and a fully-realized pro­gram oppor­tu­ni­ty in a remark­ably short amount of time.

A first-hand account of the work­camps by Kim Roberts was pub­lished lat­er than year, Rebuild­ing Church­es in Rur­al Alaba­ma: One Volunteer’s Expe­ri­ence. The D.C.-based work­camp pro­gram con­tin­ues in mod­i­fied form to this day as the William Penn Quak­er Work­camps.

Update: anoth­er pic­ture from 1996 Alaba­ma, this time from one of my wife Julie’s old pho­to books. She’s sec­ond from the left at the bot­tom, part of the longer-stay con­tin­gent that Roberts mentions.

WQW

Pareto opportunities for Friends?

June 10, 2015
· Martin Kelley

Nate Sil­ver recent­ly ran a piece on Mar­co Rubio’s pres­i­den­tial chances has used the previously-unknown-to-me con­cept of the “Pare­to fron­tier” to line up poten­tial candidates:

In eco­nom­ics, there’s a con­cept known as Pare­to effi­cien­cy. It means that you ought to be able to elim­i­nate any choice if anoth­er one dom­i­nates it along every dimen­sion. The remain­ing choic­es sit along what’s called the Pare­to frontier.

Sil­ver then fol­lowed up with a real world exam­ple that speaks to my inter­est in food:

Imag­ine that in addi­tion to White Cas­tle and The French Laun­dry, there are two Ital­ian restau­rants in your neigh­bor­hood. One is the chain restau­rant Olive Gar­den. You actu­al­ly like Olive Gar­den per­fect­ly well. But down the block is a local red-sauce joint called Giovanni’s. The food is a lit­tle bet­ter there than at Olive Gar­den (although not as good as at The French Laun­dry), and it’s a lit­tle cheap­er than Olive Gar­den (although not as cheap as White Cas­tle). So you can elim­i­nate Olive Gar­den from your reper­toire; it’s dom­i­nat­ed along both dimen­sions by Giovanni’s.

These days we choose more than our din­ner des­ti­na­tions. Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty has become a mar­ket­place. While there have always been con­verts, it feels as if the pace of reli­gious lane-changing has steadi­ly quick­ened in recent times. Many peo­ple are choos­ing their reli­gious affil­i­a­tion rather than stick­ing with the faith tra­di­tions of their par­ents. For Quak­ers, this has been a net pos­i­tive, as many of our meet­ing­hous­es are full of “con­vinced” Friends who came in to our reli­gious soci­ety as adults.

Quak­ers are some­what unique in our mar­ket poten­tial. I would argue that we fall on two spots of the reli­gious “pare­to curve”:

  • The first is a kind of mass-market entry point for the “spir­i­tu­al but not reli­gious” set that wants to dip its toe into an orga­nized reli­gion that’s nei­ther very orga­nized nor reli­gious. Lib­er­al Friends don’t have min­is­ters or creeds, we don’t feel or sound too churchy, and we’re not par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned about what new seek­ers believe. It’s a per­fect fit for do-it-yourself seek­ers that are look­ing for non-judgmental spiritually-minded progressives.
  • Our sec­ond pare­to fron­tier beach­head is more grad-school lev­el: we’re a good spot for peo­ple who have a strong reli­gious con­vic­tions but seek a com­mu­ni­ty with less restric­tions. They’ve mem­o­rized whole sec­tions of the Bible and might have the­o­log­i­cal train­ing. They’re burned out by judg­men­tal­ism and spirit-less rou­tine and are seek­ing out a more authen­tic reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty of reli­gious peers open to dis­cus­sion and growth.

It seems we often reach out to one or the oth­er type of “pare­to” seek­er. I see that as part of the dis­cus­sion around Mic­ah Bales’s recent piece on Quak­er church plant­i­ng–do we focus on new, unaf­fil­i­at­ed seek­ers or seri­ous reli­gious dis­ci­ples look­ing for a dif­fer­ent type of com­mu­ni­ty. I’d be curi­ous to hear if any Quak­er out­reach pro­grams have tried to reach out to both simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. Is it even pos­si­ble to sucess­ful­ly mar­ket that kind of dual message?

The two-touch pare­to nature of Friends and pop spir­i­tu­al cul­ture sug­gests that meet­ings could focus their inter­nal work on being the bridge from what we might call the “pare­to entrances.” New­com­ers who have walked through the door because we’re not out­ward­ly churchy could be wel­comed into Quak­erism 101 cours­es to be intro­duced to Quak­er tech­niques for spir­i­tu­al ground­ing and growth – and so they can deter­mine whether for­mal mem­ber­ship is a good fit. Those who have come for the deep spir­i­tu­al ground­ing can join as well, but also be giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ties for smaller-scale reli­gious con­ver­sa­tions and prac­tice, through Bible study groups, region­al extend­ed wor­ships and trips to region­al opportunities.

If you add charts you don't understand to blog posts, people will think you're extra smart.
If you add charts to blog posts, peo­ple will think you’re super-duper smart.

Nostalgia comes early

November 25, 2013
· Martin Kelley

One of the most famous scenes in the AMC show Mad Men comes near the end of sea­son one. Kodak has asked the adver­tis­ing firm to cre­ate a cam­paign around a new slide pro­jec­tor that has a cir­cu­lar tray. Don Drap­er presents the Carousel and gives a nostalgia-steeped pre­sen­ta­tion that use his per­son­al pho­tographs to move both the Kodak execs and the view­ers at home, who know that these semi-focused pic­tures will soon be all that left of his dis­in­te­grat­ing family.

No falling apart fam­i­ly for me, but I find myself already feel­ing nos­tal­gic for a fam­i­ly vaca­tion to Dis­ney World that doesn’t start for anoth­er six days. I’ve recent­ly been look­ing through our Flickr archive of past trips (four for me) and real­ize that they are our Carousel. The start with my fiancee tak­ing a cyn­i­cal me on my first trip. Lat­er vis­its bring kids to the pho­to­graph­ic line­up: newly-found legs to run, the joys of messy ice cream, the scare of not-very-scary rides and the big eyes of parades all run through the sets.

In less than a week we’ll start a new set. There will be two new chil­dren in this one. “The babies” are both walk­ing and tod­dling and are at their peak of baby pho­to­genic cute­ness. The old­er two are real kids now and the eldest is start­ing to show ear­ly glimpses of teenage-hood: eye-rolling, exha­la­tion of air (“uh!”) to show dis­ap­proval of incon­ve­nient parental instructions.

Icon­ic fam­i­ly pic­tures will hap­pen. Since our last vis­it five years ago, my wife’s lost her father to can­cer and my mother’s been slip­ping into the for­get­ful­ness of Alzheimer’s. As the wheel of life turns it some­how becomes more pos­si­ble to see our­selves as part of the turn­ing Carousel. Some decades from now I can imag­ine myself going through these pic­tures sur­round­ed by indulging chil­dren and antsy grand­chil­dren, exclaim­ing “look how young every­one looks!”

Theo and Francis, Dec 2008
Theo (then 5) and Fran­cis (3) zonked out after a long day in 2008. Hard to believe they were ever this cuddly.

 

Update post-trip:

There are 104 pic­tures from this trip in our pub­lic Flickr set, with one of our four kids hold­ing hands as they walk to the pool a stand­out icon­ic shot of their child­hood together:
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Georges And Trayvons

July 16, 2013
· Martin Kelley

Over on Mobtown­blues, Kevin Grif­fin Moreno cops to being George Zim­mer­man. Thank­ful­ly, he’s not: when feel­ing threat­ened in a recent sit­u­a­tion with racial over­tones, he chose to walk away, but it is worth ask­ing how dif­fer­ent we are from the char­ac­ters of this tragedy.

I nev­er had much expec­ta­tion that the tri­al of Trayvon Martin’s killer would find him guilty. A good team of lawyers can con­jure up rea­son­able doubt over most any­thing. As as Alafair Burke writes on Huff­in­g­ton, much of what Zim­mer­man did was pro­tect­ed by Florida’s insanely-crazy “stand your ground” laws. 

But even with­out that, high-profile court cas­es get so politi­cized so quick­ly that they rarely pro­vide any kind of cathar­sis, let alone jus­tice, when stacked against hun­dreds of years of racial injus­tices. And just as Zimmerman’s judge­ment was col­ored by his racial his­to­ry and bias­es, so too are ours: our opin­ions about what hap­pened that evening in San­ford, Flori­da, are much more a reac­tion to where we fall in the con­tin­u­ums of priv­i­leges than we might care to admit. 

Martin and Zimmerman, swapped races, via Whileseated.org

Priv­i­lege is unearned oppor­tu­ni­ties con­ferred by how close­ly we fit a par­tic­u­lar stereo­type. When I was in my ear­ly 20s, I was once pulled over by a police­man when I was dri­ving aim­less­ly through a sleepy town at 3 am (no good sto­ry I’m afraid: I was sim­ply bored, with insom­nia). He vis­i­bly eased up when he saw I was white, and he got almost avun­cu­lar a minute lat­er when he saw the Irish name on my dri­vers license. I know that almost-forgettable instant could have played out quite dif­fer­ent­ly if I had been black, with a Mus­lim name, per­haps, and a chip on my shoul­der because this was the fifth time that month I had got­ten detained for no good reason. 

No mat­ter what I do to edu­cate myself, I will always be George Zim­mer­man to (many) strangers on the street, just as Trayvon Mar­tin will always be a sus­pi­cious house bur­gler for being a black stranger in a hoodie. 

The work that needs to be done – or con­tin­ued, for we need to remem­ber the many times peo­ple have done the right thing – couldn’t be answered by a crim­i­nal tri­al any­way. What’s need­ed is the edu­ca­tion of soci­ety at large. 

One step is all of the con­ver­sa­tions tak­ing place on Face­book and around water cool­ers this week. Let’s talk about the fears that sub­con­scious­ly dri­ve us. For Zimmerman’s gun was only one of the trig­gers that killed Mar­tin. It was fear that gave us Sanford’s gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty and its town watch, along with our nation’s per­mis­sive gun laws and dra­con­ian legal con­cepts like “stand­ing one’s ground.” It was that potent mix of sus­pi­cion that set in motion a sit­u­a­tion that left a sev­en­teen year old kid with a pock­et­ful of Skit­tles lying dead face down in the grass. 

Can we learn to under­stand the ways we live in fear? Can we get to know one anoth­er more deeply in that place that breaks down the gates in our hearts?

The language and testimony of the fire alarm

July 15, 2013
· Martin Kelley

blankCare­ful and delib­er­ate dis­cern­ment held in a man­ner of unhur­ried prayer is fine in most instances, but what’s a group if Quak­ers to do when a fire alarm goes off? Do we sit down in silence, stay cen­tered there some num­ber if min­utes, and then open up a peri­od of min­istries to reach toward discernment. 

Of course we don’t. Who would? Like any group if peo­ple in the mod­ern world, we assem­ble with­out ques­tion and leave the premis­es. But why? Because of shared lan­guage and testimonies. 

A ring­ing bell does not, by itself, con­sti­tute a call to action. Pow­er up your time machine and bring your battery-powered alarm sys­tem back a few thou­sand years and set it off. Peo­ple would look around in con­fu­sion (and might be afraid if the alien sound), but they wouldn’t file out of a build­ing. We do it because we’ve been social­ized in a lan­guage of group warning. 

Ever since our school­days, we have been taught this lan­guage: fire alarms, flash­ing lights, fire pull box­es. We don’t need to dis­cern the sit­u­a­tion because we already know what the alarm means: the like­li­hood of immi­nent danger. 

Our response also needs lit­tle dis­cern­ment. We might think of this as a tes­ti­mo­ny: a course of action that we’ve real­ized is so core to our under­stand­ing of our rela­tion to the world that it rarely needs to be debat­ed amongst ourselves. 

I must have par­tic­i­pat­ed in a hun­dred fire drills in my life­time, but so far none of the alarms have been fires. But they have served a very real purpose. 

When we do media in an advo­ca­cy sense, most of our time is spent devel­op­ing and rein­forc­ing shared lan­guage and obvi­ous courses-of-action. We tell sto­ries of pre­vi­ous sit­u­a­tions and debate the con­tours of the tes­ti­monies. We’re ready­ing our­selves for when we will be called to action. 

Bits and pieces, remembering blogging

May 13, 2013
· Martin Kelley

I real­ly should blog here more. I real­ly should. I spend a lot of my time these days shar­ing oth­er peo­ple’s ideas. Most recent­ly, on Friends Jour­nal you can see my inter­view with Jon Watts (co-conducted with Megan Kietzman-Nicklin). The three of us talked on and on for quite some time; it was only an inflex­i­ble train sched­ule that end­ed my participation.

The favorite part of talk­ing with Jon is his enthu­si­asm and his tal­ent for keep­ing his sights set on the long pic­ture (my favorite ques­tion was ask­ing why he start­ed with a Quak­er fig­ure so obscure even I had to look him up). It’s easy to get caught up in the bus­tle of dead­lines and to-do lists and to start to for­get why we’re doing this work as pro­fes­sion­al Quak­ers. There is a real­i­ty behind the word counts. As Friends, we are shar­ing the good news of 350+ years of spir­i­tu­al adven­tur­ing: obser­va­tions, strug­gles, and imperfect-but-genuine attempts to fol­low Inward Light of the Gospels.

My nine year old son Theo is blog­ging as a class assign­ment. I think they’ve been sup­posed to be writ­ing there for awhile but he’s real­ly only got­ten the bug in the last few weeks. It’s a full-on Word­Press site, but with cer­tain restric­tions (most notably, posts only become pub­lic after the class­room teacher has had a chance to review and vet them). It’s cer­tain iron­ic to see one of my kids blog­ging more than me!

Enough blog­ging for today. Time to put the rest of the awake kids to bed. I’m going to try to have more reg­u­lar small posts so as to get back into the blog­ging habit. In the mean­time, I’m always active on my Tum­blr site (which shows up as the side­bar to the right). It’s the buck­et for my inter­net cura­tions – videos and links I find inter­est­ing, and my own pic­tures and miscellanea.

Plain like Barack

September 17, 2012
· Martin Kelley

As befits a Quak­er wit­ness, when I felt the nudge to plain­ness ten years ago, I did­n’t quite know where it would take me. I trust­ed the spir­i­tu­al nudges enough to assume there were lessons to learn. I had wit­nessed a God-centering in oth­ers who shared my spir­i­tu­al con­di­tions and I knew from read­ing that plain­ness was a typ­i­cal first step of “infant min­is­ters.” But all I had been giv­en was the invi­ta­tion to walk a par­tic­u­lar path.

After the ini­tial excite­ments, I set­tled into a rou­tine and dis­cov­ered I had lost the “what to wear?!” angst of get­ting dressed in the morn­ings. Gone too was the “who am I?” dra­ma that accom­pa­nied cat­a­log brows­ing. As clothes wore out and were retired, I reduced my clos­et down to a small set of choic­es, all vari­a­tions on one anoth­er. Now when I get dressed I don’t wor­ry about who I will see that day, who I should impress, whether one pair of shoes goes with a cer­tain sweater, etc.

Appar­ent­ly, I share this prac­tice with the forty-fourth pres­i­dent. In “Oba­ma’s Way,” a wide-ranging pro­file in Van­i­ty Fair, Michael Lewis shares the Pres­i­den­t’s atti­tude about clothes:

blank[He] was will­ing to talk about the mun­dane details of pres­i­den­tial exis­tence… You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day prob­lems that absorb most peo­ple for mean­ing­ful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m try­ing to pare down deci­sions. I don’t want to make deci­sions about what I’m eat­ing or wear­ing. Because I have too many oth­er deci­sions to make.” He men­tioned research that shows the sim­ple act of mak­ing deci­sions degrades one’s abil­i­ty to make fur­ther deci­sions. It’s why shop­ping is so exhaust­ing. “You need to focus your decision-making ener­gy. You need to rou­tinize your­self. You can’t be going through the day dis­tract­ed by trivia.”

A few dis­tract­ing caveats: we can assume Oba­ma’s grey and blue suits are bespoke and cost upwards of a thou­sand dol­lars apiece. He prob­a­bly has a clos­et full of them. He has staff that cleans them, stores them, and lays them out for him in the morn­ing. You won’t find Barack wan­der­ing the aisles of the Capi­tol Hill Macy’s or the Lan­g­ley Hill Men’s Ware­house. Michelle’s nev­er run­ning things to the dry clean­ers, and Sasha and Malia aren’t pair­ing socks from the laun­dry bin after com­ing home from school. A Pres­i­dent Rom­ney’s clos­et would also fea­ture gray and blue (though his under­wear draw­er would be more uncon­ven­tion­al). When pro­to­col calls for the commander-in-chief to devi­ate from suits – to don a tux per­haps – one appears. Pres­i­den­tial plain­ness is far from simple.

The Quak­er move­ment start­ed as an invi­ta­tion to com­mon sense. Every­one could join. Ear­ly Friends were min­i­mal­ists on fire, fear­less in aban­don­ing any­thing that got in the way of spir­i­tu­al truth. In a few short years they method­i­cal­ly worked their way to the same con­clu­sions as a twenty-first cen­tu­ry U.S. pres­i­dent: human decision-making resources are finite; our atten­tion is at a pre­mi­um. If we have a job to do (run a coun­try, wit­ness God’s King­dom), then we should clear our­selves of unnec­es­sary dis­trac­tions to focus on the essen­tials. Those core expe­ri­en­tial truths have last­ing val­ue. As Jef­fer­son might say, they are self-evident, even if they still seem rad­i­cal­ly pecu­liar to the wider world.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly the kind of plain­ness that Barack and I are talk­ing about is a kind of mind-hack, its pow­er large­ly strate­gic. I’d love to see a pres­i­dent take up the chal­lenge of some hard­core Quak­er val­ues. How about the tes­ti­mo­ny against war? Eliza Gur­ney got pret­ty far in cor­re­spon­dence with Oba­ma’s hero, hon­est Abe, but even he punt­ed respon­si­bil­i­ty to divine will. The wit­ness continues.

A traveling bus museum visits Quakerranter HQ

November 8, 2010
· Martin Kelley

This week­end we’ve had a muse­um parked in our dri­ve­way. It’s the “BUS-eum” from the Traces Cen­ter for His­to­ry and Cul­ture in St. Paul, host­ing a trav­el­ing exhib­it on Ger­man POW’s in the US dur­ing World War II. We were hap­py to host the BUS-eum’s Irv­ing Kell­man over the week­end in-between stops in Cape May Cour­t­house and Vineland.  I asked him to give us the sto­ry of the Ger­man POWs on video.

As you might guess, there was a lot of Quak­er con­nec­tions in the 1940, with Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee involve­ment. Traces’ direc­tor Michael Luick-Thrams is a Friend and did his PhD the­sis on the Scat­ter­good Hos­tel, a refugee camp set up at the then-abandoned Friends school in Iowa. Many of the BUS-eum’s stops are Friends Schools, with pub­lic libraries being anoth­er com­mon destination.

The vis­it was made with help from FGC’s Direc­to­ry of Trav­el­ing Friends. I think this is the first time we’ve actu­al­ly had a vis­i­tor after a decade of being list­ed there (most past inquiries have fall­en through when they looked at a map and real­ized our dis­tance from Pen­dle Hill, New York City or what­ev­er oth­er des­ti­na­tion brought them east).