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Visiting Petty Island

June 16, 2019
· Martin Kelley

As a lover of maps, I’ve often be intrigued by the envi­rons  of the Delaware Riv­er. As the tides go up and down, the time­less­ness of the riv­er becomes a kind of gen­tle solace to the indus­tri­al­iza­tion along its banks. Nowhere is this more appar­ent than on the islands which some­how remain in its course. I’ve camped at Pea Patch Island down by Delaware and found a sur­pris­ing fam­i­ly con­nec­tion in its con­vo­lut­ed own­er­ship. But clos­er to my com­mute is Pet­ty Island, sit­ting along­side the New Jer­sey main­land a short dis­tance north of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Pet­ty Island is owned by the Cit­go oil com­pa­ny and until just a few months ago was still dot­ted with its oil tanks and a large marine car­go facil­i­ty. Satel­lite views still show this twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry indus­try. But in a very long and oftentimes-uncertain process it’s due to become part of New Jer­sey nat­ur­al lands and even­tu­al­ly to become a pre­serve. The pub­lic is gen­er­al­ly still not allowed on the island but there are occa­sion­al trips and on this past Sat­ur­day I got to tour the island.

The fad­ed sign at the guard booth to the bridge onto the island 
The island was full of heavy truck traf­fic until quite recently. 
The north end has a lot of wind-swept fields 
Chris­tine Whor­ton of NJ Audobon and his­to­ri­an Bob Shinn led the tour. 
The island has had a num­ber of names over the last three-plus cen­turies. Even now there does­n’t seem to be a con­sis­ten­cy around use of apostrophe-s’s after the name. The guard shack and wel­come sign call it “Pet­ty’s Island” but Bob assured us it should be “Pet­ty Island.” 

We were very lucky to have Bob Shinn as our tour guide. He’s a walk­ing ency­clo­pe­dia of the island and the state geopol­i­tics and waves of names and com­mer­cial uses it’s been through. He lit­er­al­ly wrote the entry on Pet­ty Island in the Philadel­phia Ency­clo­pe­dia. Not sur­pris­ing­ly there’s a lot of Quak­ers in the ear­ly record­ed his­to­ry and the deed between the first Quak­er own­er and three Lenape rep­re­sen­ta­tives is intact in the Haver­ford Col­lege col­lec­tions (this deed was also a major part of a talk by Lenape – set­tler his­to­ry giv­en by Jean Soder­lund a few months ago at Ran­co­cas Meet­ing (see also her book Lenape Coun­try)).

The ever-changing, never-settled his­to­ry of the island con­tin­ues with its name. Wikipedia, Google Maps, and — most impor­tant­ly — Bob Shinn call it “Pet­ty Island,” while the guard shack, wel­come sign, NJ Audubon Soci­ety, and New Jer­sey Nat­ur­al Lands Trust adds the pos­ses­sive to make it “Pet­ty’s Island.” The lat­ter is espe­cial­ly awkward-sounding to my ears, as South Jer­sey place names char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly drop the apos­tro­phes over time (for exam­ple, the riv­er land­ing named after Cap­tain George May is now the town of “Mays Landing.”)

Pret­ty, tidal wet­lands along the back chan­nel of the Delaware. 
You can see why devel­op­ers want­ed to get their hands on this island and its views. 
A tidal riv­er mak­ing waves. 
My son Fran­cis was on the tour too and seemed to like it. 
Bob Shinn at the bot­tom of one of the old dredg­ing berms. Behind these the Army Corps of Engi­neers poured slur­ry tak­en from the main chan­nel of the river. 
Pret­ty mas­sive drain pipes from the slur­ry pools. 

Rem­nants of the indus­tri­al­iza­tion remain: the mas­sive three-story load­ing facil­i­ty has been kept to become the bones of a future vis­i­tors cen­ter; the adja­cent asphalt park­ing area has just been replant­ed as a mead­ow and is most­ly a lot of rocks and short blades of grass (with some Fowler’s toads!). We were lucky enough to be the first pub­lic group to be there since this had all been cleared away.

Walk­ing across the for­mer marine terminal. 
Barges were loaded three sto­ries high with car­go con­tain­ers via this structure. 
This struc­ture is solid. 
Even­tu­al­ly this will be part of a vis­i­tors center. 
A friend­ly Fowler’s toad inhab­its the new meadow. 
This was a park­ing lot at the begin­ning of the year. 
Google Maps still shows this as an indus­tri­al zone. 

Bonus: I did­n’t real­ize till we were about to get in our cars that South Jer­sey Trails was also on the tour. He wrote it up too! If you look care­ful­ly, I’m in the back­ground of one of the shots, and now that I’m look­ing I think that’s him in some of mine.

North American Quaker statistics 1937 – 2017

September 17, 2018
· Martin Kelley

These are num­bers of Friends in Cana­da and the Unit­ed States (includ­ing Alas­ka, which was tal­lied sep­a­rate­ly pri­or to state­hood) com­piled from Friends World Com­mit­tee for Con­sul­ta­tion. I dug up these num­bers from three sources:

  • 1937, 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987 from Quak­ers World Wide: A His­to­ry of FWCC by Her­bert Hadley in 1991 (many thanks to FWC­C’s Robin Mohr for a scan of the rel­e­vant chart).
  • 1972, 1992 from Earl­ham School of Reli­gion’s The Present State of Quak­erism, 1995, archived here.
  • 2002 on from FWCC direct­ly. Note: Cur­rent 2017 map.

Friends in the U.S. and Canada:

  • 1937: 114,924
  • 1957: 122,663
  • 1967: 122,780
  • 1972: 121,380
  • 1977: 119,160
  • 1987: 109,732
  • 1992: 101,255
  • 2002: 92,786
  • 2012: 77,660
  • 2017: 81,392

Friends in Amer­i­c­as (North, Mid­dle South):

  • 1937: 122,166
  • 1957: 131,000
  • 1967: 129,200
  • 1977: 132,300
  • 1987: 139,200
  • 2017: 140,065

You could write a book about what these num­bers do and don’t mean. The most glar­ing omis­sion is that they don’t show the geo­graph­ic or the­o­log­i­cal shifts that took place over time. Mid­west­ern Friends have tak­en a dis­pro­por­tion­ate hit, for exam­ple, and many Philadelphia-area meet­ings are much small­er than they were a cen­tu­ry ago, while inde­pen­dent meet­ings in the West and/or adja­cent to col­leges grew like wild­flow­ers mid-century.

My hot take on this is that the reuni­fi­ca­tion work of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry gave Quak­ers a sol­id iden­ti­ty and coher­ent struc­ture. Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years from 1952 is a remark­ably con­fi­dent doc­u­ment. In many areas, Friends became a socially-progressive, par­tic­i­pa­to­ry reli­gious move­ment that was attrac­tive to peo­ple tired of more creedal for­mu­la­tions; mixed-religious par­ents came look­ing for First-day school com­mu­ni­ty for their chil­dren. Quak­ers’ social jus­tice work was very vis­i­ble and attract­ed a num­ber of new peo­ple dur­ing the anti­war 1960s1 and the alter­na­tive com­mu­ni­ty groundswell of the 1970s. These var­i­ous new­com­ers off­set the decline of what we might call “eth­nic” Friends in rur­al meet­ings through this period.

That mag­ic bal­ance of Quak­er cul­ture match­ing the zeit­geist of reli­gious seek­ers dis­ap­peared some­where back in the 1980s. We aren’t on fore­front of any cur­rent spir­i­tu­al trends. While there are bright spots and excep­tions 2, we’ve large­ly strug­gled with retain­ing new­com­ers in recent years. We’re los­ing our elders more quick­ly than we’re bring­ing in new peo­ple, hence the forty per­cent drop since the high water of 1987. The small 2017 uptick might be a good sign3 or it may be a sta­tis­ti­cal phan­tom.4 I’ll be curi­ous to see what the next cen­sus brings.

2023 Update: I seem to have mixed up some num­bers in my orig­i­nal 2018 post and have cor­rect­ed them above.

New Jersey Transit wastes our time again

August 20, 2018
· Martin Kelley

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I just came back from what was billed as a kind of hearing/information meet­ing on New Jer­sey Tran­sit’s planned shut­down of the Atlantic City Line. At least two of us had tak­en this seri­ous­ly enough that we had writ­ten 500-word state­ments (here’s mine) but as soon as I walked into the Atlantic City rail sta­tion this morn­ing at 8am, I real­ized that this was just a pro-forma, dis­or­ga­nized PR appearance.

The chief exec­u­tive of New Jer­sey Tran­sit, Kevin Cor­bett 5, was there telling us the same list of excus­es for the shut­down they’ve been telling us, name­ly, that this is about Pos­i­tive Train Con­trol (PTC) test­ing 6. At least I think he was. NJT appar­ent­ly does­n’t believe in micro­phones. I squeezed as close­ly as I could in the amor­phous crowd of maybe 100 pas­sen­gers who had turned up but I still could only make out a few words. Near­est Cor­bett were video cam­eras whose spot­lights lit up his face. Maybe I can watch the news tonight and hear the meet­ing that I drove forty min­utes to attend7.

I did hear repeat­ed invok­ing of “PTC” but no of those words were admis­sions or mea cul­pas about the long-simmering labor prob­lems that have led to train crew short­ages. Because NJ Tran­sit’s man­age­ment have been behind tar­gets for train­ing new crews, and because engi­neers have been leav­ing for better-paying jobs on Amtrak and Metro North, there aren’t enough crews to run all of its lines and also do PTC test­ing. The eas­i­est fix to the labor short­age is to just shut down the least polit­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed train line and rede­ploy its crews to NYC-bound trains. We’re told this is a tem­po­rary fix but what if the man­age­ment prob­lems hir­ing, train­ing, and retain­ing crews con­tin­ues to bot­tom out?

After half an hour of this, Tran­sit police found portable line mark­ers so that pas­sen­gers could line up to talk to Cor­bett. There were many pas­sen­gers I rec­og­nized from my 15 years of com­mut­ing this line and I stood try­ing to hear them but again, to no avail. It was clear he was just giv­ing the line.

Near­by was a table with sched­ules. I was pret­ty unhap­py but I asked them a spe­cif­ic ques­tion 8. At least the Tran­sit employ­ee said she did­n’t know and would look into it. She even wrote “Far­ley” on a pad of paper. I guess my trip was­n’t total­ly wasted.

If you’re a South Jer­sey local affect­ed by all this, there’s a peti­tion to sign. My friend Joseph (bicy­cleri­i­ights on Twit­ter) has also done a great job writ­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of vision­ary South Jer­sey tran­sit reform. Update: Also, Nore­ast­er­N­ick did a much bet­ter job get­ting to the front of the line and chal­leng­ing Cor­bett. His video is great.

Peterson Toscano is a reluctant minister

July 12, 2018
· Martin Kelley

This week’s fea­tured arti­cle over at Friends Jour­nal is Peter­son Toscano’s “A Reluc­tant Min­is­ter.”

Satire and irony, espe­cial­ly when it is sub­tle, done in char­ac­ter, or relies on tone can be mis­un­der­stood when tak­en lit­er­al­ly. Friends can get so caught up in the words that we miss the point. It is nev­er fun explain­ing a joke to a Friend, but even that inter­ac­tion is part of the work of pre­sent­ing per­for­mance art for Quak­ers. We are com­mit­ted to fair­ness and love. Com­e­dy can be used to hurt oth­ers or to make light of seri­ous issues. Unpack­ing a joke can lead to rich dis­cus­sion. I seek to use com­e­dy to shed light on impor­tant issues. Still, some Friends pre­fer the straight­for­ward mes­sage over the com­ic performance. 

I real­ly appre­ci­ate the care and hon­esty that Peter­son has put into defin­ing his work. It would be so easy for him to label his per­for­mance art as min­istry and wear it as a cloak of respectabil­i­ty. Much of his work does indeed act as min­istry and he uses a clear­ness com­mit­tee as a Quak­er dis­cern­ment tool. But he wants to keep a space open for what you might call artis­tic con­fu­sion and so describes him­self as a “the­atri­cal per­for­mance activist.”

When the pen­du­lum began trend toward re-embracing the ideas of min­istry with­in Lib­er­al Quak­erism some years back, many forms of pub­lic work start­ed being labeled min­istry. It might be a sign of the incom­plete­ness of our follow-through that few of the peo­ple com­ing for­ward with min­istries felt com­fort­able call­ing them­selves min­is­ters. I like the idea of keep­ing middle-ground spaces that we don’t try to arti­fi­cial­ly kludge into clas­sic Quak­er models. 


A Reluctant Minister

A Reluc­tant Minister 

Reflec­tions on per­for­mance art among Friends.

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Portland, Oregon high school ditching controversial ‘Quakers’ mascot

May 9, 2018
· Martin Kelley

On the list of reli­gious prob­lems, the use of “Quak­er” by non-Friends is more mys­tery than prob­lem. There’s the multi­na­tion­al giant Quak­er Oats Com­pa­ny of course, peri­od­i­cal­ly mak­ing tone deaf state­ment with its name. Friends of a cer­tain age might remem­ber 1989’s rebrand­ed Pop­eye the Quak­er Man and every eigh­teen months the laugh-out-loud Quak­er Oats threat­ens to sue us sto­ry goes re-viral on Face­book (the page is undat­ed and so always feels new; the inci­dent is at least 15 years old).

There are also var­i­ous schools who brand their sports teams with the Quak­er name. But a Port­land, Ore­gon, news sta­tion says that list is get­ting a bit small­er: Franklin High School ditch­ing con­tro­ver­sial ‘Quak­ers’ mascot

An assis­tant prin­ci­pal and anoth­er teacher told FOX 12 they shift­ed away from brand­ing the school as “Quak­ers” sev­er­al years ago. Sev­er­al stu­dents also said they don’t know much about who Quak­ers are or the reli­gion. Sev­er­al seemed to think Ben­jamin Franklin, who the school is named after, was a Quak­er. Franklin was not a Quak­er. FOX 12 also spoke to Kel­ly McCur­dy, who put three chil­dren through Franklin High. He said he believes the dis­trict is mak­ing a mis­take and eras­ing tra­di­tion. “I think it’s sil­ly, per­son­al­ly,” McCur­dy said. “It’s not racial­ly insensitive.”

It seems that the Fox affil­i­ate went out of its way to find a cranky per­son to deplore a point no one was mak­ing. Of course it’s not racial­ly insen­si­tive. But these appro­pri­at­ed names are always… well, weird. No pub­lic school would call them­selves The Jews or The Mus­lims or The Catholics or any­thing else smelling of reli­gion. It’s a sign of how dis­missed Friends are as a actu­al liv­ing reli­gious move­ment and denom­i­na­tion that our nick­name is con­sid­ered fair game. We must turn to the local news­pa­per to get the real back­ground:

Lisa Zuni­ga told the board that in 2014 she met Mia Pisano, a fel­low Franklin High par­ent who is a mem­ber of the Quak­er faith, and the pair start­ed an effort to change the name. The name, they argued, vio­lat­ed the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state. The dis­trict, they said, should nev­er com­man­deer a reli­gious sym­bol or con­no­ta­tion for a mas­cot. Despite inter­est in the name change, Zuni­ga said, par­ents met stiff resis­tance from the dis­trict. It was hard to even get any­one to explain what the process would be to bring about a name change, she said.

https://​www​.ore​gonlive​.com/​e​d​u​c​a​t​i​o​n​/​i​n​d​e​x​.​s​s​f​/​2​0​1​8​/​0​5​/​p​o​r​t​l​a​n​d​_​s​c​h​o​o​l​_​b​o​a​r​d​_​f​i​n​d​s​_​q​u​.​h​tml

http://​www​.kptv​.com/​s​t​o​r​y​/​3​8​1​4​5​8​3​3​/​f​r​a​n​k​l​i​n​-​h​i​g​h​-​s​c​h​o​o​l​-​d​i​t​c​h​i​n​g​-​c​o​n​t​r​o​v​e​r​s​i​a​l​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​s​-​m​a​s​cot

Have we abandoned all hope for a viral Quakerism?

April 25, 2018
· Martin Kelley

So a curi­ous sta­tis­tic: so far no one has sub­mit­ted any arti­cles for the August Friends Jour­nal issue, “Going Viral with Quak­erism.” Is this a sign that we’ve all just giv­en up all hope of Quak­er spir­i­tu­al­i­ty mak­ing a dif­fer­ence in the world?

Prob­a­bly not: there are many issues for which we only get sub­mis­sions in the last week before dead­line (or the week after dead­line, which is not to be encour­aged). But if you are think­ing of writ­ing, or have been mean­ing to encour­age a friend with vision to send us some­thing, then by all means sit down in front of a keyboard.

Also, the issue after that is non-themed. If you’ve ever had any ques­tions for writ­ing a gen­er­al sub­mis­sion, let me know in the com­ments or direct mes­sage me. I’m writ­ing some­thing about that process this week.


Writing Opp: Going Viral with Quakerism (due 5/14) - Friends Journal

Writ­ing Opp: Going Viral with Quak­erism (due 5/14) — Friends Journal 

What’s the Quak­er mes­sage for today? How do we com­mu­ni­cate it and how do we share it? What…

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Mixing Quakers & Politics

March 19, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Greg Woods is the pri­ma­ry mover behind this Thurs­day’s live pan­el of Quak­er con­gres­sion­al can­di­dates. He’s writ­ten a new post about it, Quak­ers & Pol­i­tics Do Mix (in the 2018 Midterms)

This year’s elec­tion feel dif­fer­ent than pre­vi­ous years. Peo­ple are ready to do some­thing besides just vot­ing. Many are run­ning for office in record num­bers, for exam­ple: Sci­en­tists and Women.Another pop­u­la­tion that is run­ning in, per­haps, record num­bers in 2018: Quakers!

He’s added a lot of inter­est­ing con­tex­tu­al links to arti­cles about the new types of can­di­dates we’re see­ing in the 2018 election.

To make sure you get the lat­est infor­ma­tion on the live pan­el, sign up for the live web pan­el’s Face­book event. And join us at 3pm ET for our live web pan­el. We’ll also be con­tin­u­ing to update the Friends Jour­nal announce­ment page.

A chatty email newsletter

March 9, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Over the years I’ve noticed var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion break­downs among Friends that have made me wor­ried. It’s often some­thing rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle. For exam­ple, I might be talk­ing to an active Philadel­phia Friend and be star­tled to real­ize they have no idea that a major year­ly meet­ing across the coun­try is break­ing apart. Or some­one will send me an arti­cle bemoan­ing the lack of some­thing that I know already exists.

I’m in this fun­ny posi­tion where I have a quar­ter cen­tu­ry of ran­dom Quak­er fac­toids in my head, have access to great data­bas­es (like instant search­es of Friends Jour­nal’s 60+ years of arti­cles), and have good Googling chops. When I’m in a dis­cus­sion with Friends face-to-face, I find I often have use­ful con­text. Some of it is his­tor­i­cal (I geek out on the Quak­er past) but some of it is just my lived mem­o­ry. I’ve been in and out of Quak­er offices for 27 years now. I’m enter­ing this weird phase of life in which I’ve been a pro­fes­sion­al Quak­er staffer longer than most of my contemporaries.

And ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this weird tal­ent to remem­ber things I read years ear­li­er. When the top­ic of clear­ness com­mit­tees recent­ly came up, I remem­bered that Deb­o­rah Haines had writ­ten a piece about Rachel Davis DuBois in the long-defunct FGCon­nec­tions newslet­ter (yes, groan­er of a name but it was a great pub­li­ca­tion in its hey­day). Thanks to Archive​.org I could resur­face the arti­cle and bring it to the discussions.

And so, I’ve been qui­et­ly been chang­ing the idea of Quak­er Ranter from a clas­sic old-school blog to a dai­ly email newslet­ter. I’ll still col­lect inter­est­ing Quak­er links, as I’ve been doing for years with Quak­erQuak­er. But now I’ll anno­tate them and give them con­text. If there’s a side sto­ry I think is inter­est­ing I’ll tell it. I have a long train com­mute and writ­ing fun and geeky things about Friends makes it interesting.

I think that some­thing like this could help bring Quak­er new­com­ers up to speed. Our insid­er lan­guage and unex­plained (and some­times dat­ed) world­views cre­ate an imped­i­ment for seek­ers. We kind of expect they’ll fig­ure out things that aren’t so obvi­ous. Learn­ing fac­toids and his­to­ries a day at a time can give them some con­text to under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing Sun­day morn­ing. If that’s not enough, I also have an Ask A Quak­er fea­ture where peo­ple new to Friends can ask ques­tions. I’ll be lib­er­al­ly pitch­ing Friends Jour­nal arti­cles and Quak­er­S­peak videos because I think we’re doing some of our best Quak­er media work, but I’m also all about spread­ing the love and will share many oth­er great resources and blogs.

As with all my projects I also hope to get peo­ple con­tribut­ing so it becomes a com­mu­ni­ty water­ing hole. If you want to get involved, the first step is to sign up for the free dai­ly email list. At some point, this will prob­a­bly out­grow the free tier of the email ser­vice I’m using, and I will start to have to pay to send the­see emails out. For those of you with a lit­tle extra to give, Quak­er Ranter Mem­ber­ship is a way to help off­set these costs.

And let your friends know about it! Just send them to quak​er​ran​ter​.org/​e​m​ail to sign up.