In the news front, I’m no longer working at FGC. Reasons are complicated, as is often the case. In eight years I did some good work with some great people. I’ll be missing the hard-working and faithful colleagues and committee members I got to serve with over the years. I’ll be working on building my tech career and look forward to new challenges. Transitions are always a bit scary, so hold us in your prayers in this time.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ time
Simple Design does not mean simple execution
August 23, 2006
Every
website should try to serve a clear set of purposes. Even a personal
blog has a target audience, one’s friends or family perhaps. While a
good site looks simple, it is often very complicated “under the hood.”
Google
went from being a grad school project to the world’s most important
search engine by ditching the design clutter of its competitors for a
very clean homepage with maximum white space. This effect focused one’s
attention on the search function. More PhD’s are said to work at Google
than at any other company in the world, yet the complicated engineering
and the tremendous computer infrastructure that brings that logo and
search box to your computer is invisible to the average user.
Even websites without PhD designers need to marry a simple outward
appearance with a more complicated set of calculations around intended
audiences. The average visitor looks at one or two pages on a site and
then hits the back button. Often they’ll be following a search link and
looking at a page buried deep in your site. They’ll be there seeking
out specific information and you only have about twenty seconds to
pitch your site and keep them there. You need to give them a very
concise description of yourself or product and you need to entice them
with related material.
Any site that consists of more than three pages presents visitors
with more information than they can handle. Good design works to funnel
visitors to the specific content they are looking for. It’s relatively
easy to get a first-time visitor but successful websites keep them on
your site and give them reasons to return. The key to this is defining
your audience and presenting your material with them in mind.
Once you’ve identified your constituency and built your design, the
next step is release. You don’t want to pander to a potential audience,
but instead converse with them. It’s fine to mix different elements of
your life together and to write creatively off-topic once in awhile.
There are a thousand generic websites crammed full of useless bu
zzphrases and unused featured. What you want is one that will have a
voice, that builds a niche that no one else might ever have identified.
When it comes time to produce content, forget all the slick marketing
calculations you’ve done and let your quirkiness shine.
Reading John Woolman 3: The Isolated Saint
August 17, 2006
Reading John Woolman Series:
1: The Public Life of a Private Man
2: The Last Safe Quaker
3: The Isolated Saint
It’s said that John Woolman re-wrote his Journal three times in an effort to excise it of as many “I” references as possible. As David Sox writes in Johh Woolman Quintessential Quaker, “only on limited occasion do we glimpse Woolman as a son, a father and a husband.” Woolman wouldn’t have been a very good blogger. Quoting myself from my introduction to Quaker blogs:
blogs give us a unique way of sharing our lives — how our Quakerism intersects with the day-to-day decisions that make up faithful living. Quaker blogs give us a chance to get to know like-minded Friends that are separated by geography or artificial theological boundaries and they give us a way of talking to and with the institutions that make up our faith community.
I’ve read many great Woolman stories over the years and as I read the Journal I eagerly anticipated reading the original account. It’s that same excitement I get when walking the streets of an iconic landscape for the first time: walking through London, say, knowing that Big Ben is right around the next corner. But Woolman kept letting me down.
One of the AWOL stories is his arrival in London. The Journal’s account:
On the 8th of Sixth Month, 1772, we landed at London, and I went straightway to the Yearly Meeting of ministers and elders, which had been gathered, I suppose, about half an hour. In this meeting my mind was humbly contrite.
But set the scene. He had just spent five weeks crossing the Atlantic in steerage among the pigs (he doesn’t actually specify his non-human bunkmates). He famously went out of his way to wear clothes that show dirt because they show dirt. He went straightaway: no record of a bath or change of clothes. Stories abound about his reception, and while are some of dubious origin, there are first hand accounts of his being shunned by the British ministers and elders. The best and most dubious story is the theme of another post.
I trust that Woolman was honestly aiming for meekness when he omitted the most interesting stories of his life. But without the context of a lived life he becomes an ahistorical figure, an icon of goodness divorced from the minutiae of the daily grind. Two hundred and thirty years of Quaker hagiography and latter-day appeals to Woolman’s authority have turned the tailor of Mount Holly into the otherworldly Quaker saint but the process started at John’s hands himself.
Were his struggles merely interior? When I look to my own ministry, I find the call to discernment to be the clearest part of the work. I need to work to be ever more receptive to even the most unexpected prompting from the Inward Christ and I need to constantly practice humility, love and forgiveness. But the practical limitations are harder. For years respectibility was an issue; relative poverty continues to be one. It is asking a lot of my wife to leave responsibility for our two small boys for even a long weekend.
How did Woolman balance family life and ministry? What did wife Sarah think? And just what was his role in the sea-change that was the the “Reformation of American Quakerism” (to use Jack Marietta’s phrase) that forever altered American Friends’ relationship with the world and set the stage for the schisms of the next century.
We also lose the context of Woolman’s compatriots. Some are named as traveling companions but the colorful characters go unmentioned. What did he think of the street-theater antics of Benjamin Lay, the Abbie Hoffman of Philadelphia Quakers. The most widely-told tale is of Lay walking into Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions, opening up a cloak to reveal military uniform underneath, and declaring that slave-made products were products of war, plunged a sword into a hollowed-out Bible full of pig’s blood, splattering Friends sitting nearby.
What role did Woolman play in the larger anti-slavery awakening happening at the time? It’s hard to tell just reading his Journal. How can we find ways to replicate his kind of faithfulness and witness today? Again, his Journal doesn’t give much clue.
Picked up today in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Library:
- The Reformation of American Quakerism, by Jack Marietta
- John Woolman Quintessential Quaker, by David Sox
- The Tendering Presence: Essays on John Woolman, edited by Mike Heller
PYM Librarian Rita Varley reminded me today they mail books anywhere in the US for a modest fee and a $50/year subscription. It’s a great deal and a great service, especially for isolated Friends. The PYM catalog is online too!
Reading John Woolman 1: The Public Life of a Private Man
August 7, 2006
Reading John Woolman Series:
1: The Public Life of a Private Man
2: The Last Safe Quaker
3: The Isolated Saint
I’ve finally done it. I’ve read John Woolman’s Journal. Here I’ve been an activist among Quakers for almost two decades and I’ve read one of our Big Books.
I have tried before. Many’s the time over the years where I cracked open Moulton’s edition to settle myself down. Chapter one read, chapter two read. Then to chapter three, opening with:
About this time, believing it good for me to settle, and thinking seriously about a companion, my heart was turned to the Lord with desires that He would give me wisdom to proceed therein agreeably to His will, and He was pleased to give me a well-inclined damsel, Sarah Ellis, to whom I was married the 18th of Eighth Month, 1749.
And that’s it. One run-on sentence about courting and marrying his wife. I always put the book down here. I tuck a bookmark in with all good intentions of continuing after dinner. But the book sits on the coffee table till a week or so goes by, whereupon it’s moved to the library area for a month or so until it’s finally reshelved. The bookmarks stays put until a year or two passes and I re-start the Journal with renewed determination.
I know why the sentence stops me. Throughout my twenties and early thirties a lot of my emotional energy was drained in the (mostly Quaker) dating scene. In theory I thought it a good time “for me to settle” and would have been quite content with a “well-inclined damsel.” But the chaos of my personal family history combined with the casual dating culture combined to keep me distracted with the largely-manufactured drama of relationship roller-coasters. For better or worse, if and when I ever write a journal I will have to find a way to talk about the ways this dating era both fed and stunted my spiritual growth.
One of the lesson I learned back in the early 90s when I was editor at New Society Publishers was that I should pay attention when I put a manuscript or book down. The temptation is to chalk it up to tiredness or a busy life but I found there was usually something going on in the text itself that caused me to drop it. When I picked the manuscript back up and re-read the passages on either side of my abandoned bookmark, I found some sort of shift of tone that weakened the book.
I appreciate that Quaker journals are not racy memoirs; they have a specific religious education purpose. But I think it’s natural to look to them for clues about how to live our lives. Samuel Bownas talks a bit about his engagement and David Ferris turns meeting his future wife into quite a humorous story. Perhaps Woolman was such a saintly aesthete that Sarah was simply presented to him with no futher questions. But still, there’s a level of privacy in Woolman’s writings that separates him from us; I’ll return to this is part three.
Before I go: so how did I get through the journal this time? Two things are different now: first, my five year wedding anniversary is only a few weeks away; and second: Woolman’s Journal is now always with me inside my Palm Pilot (courtesy the Christian Classics Etherial Library). A few weeks ago I found myself on the train without reading material and started reading!
Next Time: Wrapping ourselves in the flag of Woolman
Why would a Quaker do a crazy thing like that?
June 10, 2006
Looking back at Friends’ responses to the Christian Peacemaker hostages
When four Christian Peacemakers were taken hostage in Iraq late last November, a lot of Quaker organizations stumbled in their response. With Tom Fox we were confronted by a full-on liberal Quaker Christian witness against war, yet who stepped up to explain this modern-day prophetic witness? AFSC? FCNL? FGC? Nope, nope and nope. There were too many organizations that couldn’t manage anything beyond the boilerplate social justice press release. I held my tongue while the hostages were still in captivity but throughout the ordeal I was mad at the exposed fracture lines between religious witness and social activism.
Whenever a situation involving international issues of peace and witness happens, the Quaker institutions I’m closest to automatically defer to the more political Quaker organizations: for example, the head of Friends General Conference told staff to direct outsiders inquiring about Tom Fox to AFSC even though Fox had been an active leader of FGC-sponsored events and was well known as a committed volunteer. The American Friends Service Committee and Friends Committee on National Legislation have knowledgeable and committed staff, but their institutional culture doesn’t allow them to talk Quakerism except to say we’re a nice bunch of social-justice-loving people. I appreciate that these organizations have a strong, vital identity, and I accept that within those confines they do important work and employ many faithful Friends. It’s just that they lack the language to explain why a grocery store employee with a love of youth religious education would go unarmed to Badgdad in the name of Christian witness.
The wider blogosphere was totally abuzz with news of Christian Peacemaker Team hostages (Google blogsearch lists over 6000 posts on the topic). There were hundreds of posts and comments, including long discussions on the biggest (and most right-leaning) sites. Almost everyone wondered why the CPT workers were there, and while the opinions weren’t always friendly (the hostages were often painted as naive idealists or disingenuous terrorist sympathizers), even the doubters were motivated by a profound curiosity and desire to understand.
The CPT hostages were the talk of the blogosphere, yet where could we find a Quaker response and explanation? The AFSC responded by publicizing the statements of moderate Muslim leaders (calling for the hostages’ release; I emailed back a suggestion about listing Quaker responses but never got a reply). Friends United Meeting put together a nice enough what-you-can-do page that was targeted toward Friends. The CPT site was full of information of course, and there were plenty of stories on the lefty-leaning sites like electroniciraq.net and the UK site Ekklesia. But Friends explaining this to the world?
The Quaker bloggers did their part. On December 2 I quickly re-jiggered the technology behind QuakerQuaker.org to provide a Christian Peacemaker watch on both Nonviolence.org and QuakerQuaker (same listings, merely rebranded for slightly-separate audiences, announced on the post It’s Witness Time). These pages got lots of views over the course of the hostage situation and included many posts from the Quaker blogger community that had recently congealed.
But here’s the interesting part: I was able to do this only because there was an active Quaker blogging community. We already had gathered together as a group of Friends who were willing to write about spirituality and witness. Our conversations had been small and intimate but now we were ready to speak to the world. I sometimes get painted as some sort of fundamentalist Quaker, but the truth is that I’ve wanted to build a community that would wrestle with these issues, figuring the wrestling was more important than the language of the answers. I had already thought about how to encourage bloggers and knit a blogging community together and was able to use these techniques to quickly build a Quaker CPT response.
Two other Quakers who went out of their way to explain the story of Tom Fox: his personal friends John Stephens and Chuck Fager. Their Freethecaptivesnow.org site was put together impressively fast and contained a lot of good links to news, resources and commentary. But like me, they were over-worked bloggers doing this in their non-existant spare time (Chuck is director of Quaker House but he never said this was part of the work).
After an initial few quiet days, Tom’s meeting Langley Hill put together a great website of links and news. That makes it the only official Quaker organization that pulled together a sustained campaign to support Tom Fox.
Lessons?
So what’s up with all this? Should we be happy that all this good work happened by volunteers? Johan Maurer has a very interesting post, “Are Quakers Marginal?” that points to my earlier comment on the Christian Peacemakers and doubts whether our avoidance of “hireling priests” has given us a more effective voice. Let’s remember that institutional Quakerism began as support of members in jail for their religious witness; among our earliest committee gatherings were meetings for sufferings — business meetings focused on publicizing the plight of the jailed and support the family and meetings left behind.
I never met Tom Fox but it’s clear to me that he was an exceptional Friend. He was able to bridge the all-too-common divide between Quaker faith and social action. Tom was a healer, a witness not just to Iraqis but to Friends. But I wonder if it was this very wholeness that made his work hard to categorize and support. Did he simply fall through the institutional cracks? When you play baseball on a disorganized team you miss a lot of easy catches simply because all the outfielders think the next guy is going to go for the ball. Is that what happened? And is this what would happen again?
“Food for Fire” workshop at Powell House
December 27, 2005
In early February I’m leading a young adult workshop up at New York Yearly Meeting’sPowell House. I don’t have any desire to get into the “spiritual workshop circuit,” but I was asked and it seemed like an opportunity to gather some interesting folks to talk about what we hunger for. The workshop is called “Food for Fire: Breaking into the Power of Quakerism” (already regretting the “breaking in” metaphor – shouldn’t it be “broken in by?”).
I hope that some of the extended Quaker Ranter family will be able to make it out. This could be a kind of Mid-Atlantic/New England gathering of whatever this of informal movement/network is. Because this is a workshop model I am expected to impart knowledge but while I’ll come with an worked-out agenda, I’m happy to loosen and/or toss it aside if needed. The workshop description:
Many of the classic themes of Quakerism speak to the condition of a world wracked by consumerism, war, bigotry and environmental disregard. Friends have a history of uniting truth and love and turning it into action. We’ll reach into the Quaker attic to dust off gospel order, plain living, traveling ministry, prophetic witness; we’ll try them on and see how they fit into our experiences of the living Spirit. There will be plenty of time to share stories in small groups and together. How are our monthly meetings doing recognizing the gifts of ministry and service among younger Friends? How are Friends doing spreading the good news of the Quaker way? There is a great people to be gathered still but how can we enter into the faithfulness required? Jesus came up the fishermen and said “Come, follow me;” what would we do if we got that call? Like any programmed Quaker event the workshop is really an excuse to assemble Friends together in prayer and faithfulness to God. The most important thing we could do this weekend is build friendships: friendships of support, mutual accountability, and peer mentorship. Friends from all branches of Quakerism welcome, as are the newest of seekers.
The price is $180 for the weekend but if that’s a burden then try to get your meeting to pay – I suspect they’ll be happy to see that you’re showing an interest in Quakerism. I’ll be driving up from South Jersey and will probably be able to pick up folks from Philly & New York. Email me if you have or need a ride from other points and I’ll try to connect you with other travelers.
If you’re too old or too impatient to wait for Second Month to roll around, pick up Brian Drayton’s new book On Living with a Concern for Gospel Ministry and read that instead. Yes, I plugged it five days ago and yes, my paycheck comes from the publisher – but I’ve now now read the first chapter and it really is that good. Reading it feels like putting that soon-to-be-favorite pop album on the turntable for the first time. Where were you when you first heard Sgt Peppers? (for the YAFs in the audience: yes I’m being silly with the Beatles reference; if you remember first putting that album on a turntable in 1967 then this isn’t your workshop!).
It’s witness time
December 2, 2005
Hi QuakerRanter friends: I’ve been busy today covering the Quaker response to the Christian Peacemakers Teams hostages. Two sites with a lot of overlapping content:
- Quaker Blog Watch page focused on the hostages
- “Nonviolence.org statement and list of responses
Both of these feature a mix of mainstream news and Quaker views on the situation. I’ll keep them updated. I’m not the only busy Friend: Chuck Fager and John Stephens have a site called Free the Captives — check it out.
It’s always interesting to see the moments that I explictly identify as a Friend on Nonviolence.org. As I saythere, it seems quite appropriate. We need to explain to the world why a Quaker and three other Christians would needlessly put themselves in such danger. This is witness time, Friends. The real deal. We’re all being tested. This is one of those times for which those endless committee meetings and boilerplate peace statements have prepared us.
It’s time to tell the world that we live in the power that “takes away the occasion for war and overcomes our fear of death” (well, or at least mutes it enough that four brave souls would travel to dangerous lands to witness our faith).
Two Years of the Quaker Ranter and Quaker Blogs
October 10, 2005
An amazing thing has happened in the last two years: we’ve got Friends from the corners of Quakerism sharing our similarities and differences, our frustrations and dreams through Quaker blogs. Disenchanted Friends who have longed for deeper conversation and consolation when things are hard at their local meeting have built a network of Friends who understand. When our generation is settling down to write our memoirs — our Quaker journals — a lot of us will have to have at least one chapter about becoming involved in the Quaker blogging community.
When I signed off on my last post, I promised I would continue with something on “blogs, ministry and liberal Quaker outreach.” Here’s the first of the follow-ups.
As I settle in to my second week at my new (and newly-defined) jobs at FGC, I wonder if I be here without help of the Quaker Ranter? I started this blog two summers ago. It was a time when I felt like I might be headed toward membership in the lost Quaker generation that was the focus of one of my earliest posts. There were a lot of dead-ends in my life. A couple of applications for more serious, responsible employment with Friends had recently gone nowhere. Life at my monthly meeting was odd (we’ll keep it at that). I felt I was coming into a deeper experiential knowledge of my Quakerism and perhaps inching toward more overt ministry but there was no outlet, no sense of how this inward transformation might fit into any sort of outward social form or forum.
Everywhere I looked I saw Friends shortcoming themselves and our religious society with a don’t-rock-the-boat timidity that wasn’t serving God’s purpose for us. I saw precious little prophetic ministry. I knew of few Friends who were asking challenging questions about our worship life. Our language about God was becoming ever more coded and sterilized. Most of the twenty-somethings I knew generally approached Quakerism primarily as a series of cultural norms with only different standards from one yearly meeting to another (and one Quaker branch to another, I suspect) .
With all this as backdrop, I started the Quaker Ranter with a nothing-left-to-lose mentality. I was nervous about pushing boundaries and about broaching things publicly that most Friends only say in hushed tones of two or three on meetinghouse steps. I was also doubly nervous about being a Quaker employee talking about this stuff (livelihood and all that!). The few Quaker blogs that were out there were generally blogs by Quakers but about anything but Quakerism, politics being the most common topic.
Now sure, a lot of this hasn’t changed over these few years. But one thing has: we now have a vibrant community of Quaker bloggers. We’ve got folks from the corners of Quakerism getting to know one another and hash out not just our similarities and differences, but our frustrations and dreams. It’s so cool. There’s something happening in all this! Disenchanted Friends who have longed for deeper conversation and consolation when things are hard at their local meeting are finding Friends who understand.
Through the blog and the community that formed around it I’ve found a voice. I’m evolving, certainly, through reading, life, blog conversations and most importantly (I hope!) the acting of the Holy Spirit on my ever-resistant ego. But because of my blog I’m someone who now feels comfortable talking about what it means to be a Quaker in a public setting. It almost seems quaint to think back to the early blog conversations about whether we can call this a kind of ministry. When we’re all settling down to write our memoirs — our Quaker journals — a lot of us will have to have at least one chapter about becoming involved in the Quaker blogging community. In Howard Brinton’s Quaker Journals he enumerated the steps toward growth in the ministry that most of the writers seemed to go through; I suspect the journals of our generation will add self-published electronic media to it’s list of classic steps.
When I started Quaker Ranter I did have to wonder if this might be a quickest way to get fired. Not to cast aspersions on the powers-that-be at FGC but the web is full of cautionary tales of people being canned because of too-public blogs. My only consolation was the sense that no one that mattered really read the thing. But as it became more prominent a curious phenomenon happened: even Quaker staff and uber-insiders seemed to be relating to this conversation and wanted a place to complain and dream about Quakerism. My personal reputation has certainly gone up because of this site, directly and indirectly because of the blog. This brings with it the snares of popular praise (itself a well-worn theme in Quaker journals) but it also made it more likely I would be considered for my new outreach job. It’s funny how life works.
Okay, that’s enough for a post. I’ll have to keep outreach till next time. But bear with me: it’s about form too and how form contributes to ministry.
PS: Talking of two years of Quaker blogging… My “Nonviolence.org turns ten years old this Thursday!! I thought about making a big deal about it but alas there’s so little time.