Last week I interviewed Quaker healer John Calvi for a Friends Journal author chat. John has long worked with trauma victims and those suffering from AIDS and he tells part of that story in March’s “Carrying Light to Need.” One of the parts of this that fascinates me is his sharing of losing much of his spiritual insight after a recent illness. Regular readers of this blog know I love stories of Friends who are able to sense promptings and to have that ability and then lose it is a piece of the mystery of where it comes from. I’m reminded of Anne E.G. Nydam’s “The Conduits” from the November 2022 fiction issue; I can’t say more without spoilers but read it and you’ll see what I mean.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
The Quakers Today podcast is back
March 13, 2024
The podcast is back for season three — now with a new cohost, Miche McCall. First up, a look at Quakers and community. It includes an interviews with Nathan Kleban about his experience with intentional communities and economic justice work and excerpts from Lauren Brownlee’s recent QuakerSpeak video on using Quaker testimonies to confront white supremacy.
Visit to Unexpected Wildlife Refuge
March 12, 2024
The family went to a new South Jersey Pine Barren’s spot outside of Newfield. The Unexpected Refuge is really wet and really wild — be prepared for soaked boots and some creative bushwacking even on the blazed trails. South Jersey Trails has profiled it already, of course, so you can get more details there (notably, you have to schedule your first visit so as to get an orientation). There’s also a Facebook page.
Meeting John Woolman
March 12, 2024
John Woolman visited my meeting this weekend and let me tell you, he looked good for a 300-year-old. Actually, of course, it was a re-enactor: Charles Bruder, of the John Woolman Memorial. I tried writing down a bit of his ministry as Woolman (taken from Woolman’s Journal).
Links
March 11, 2024
- In a new QuakerSpeak, Lynette Davis discusses how writing is a spiritual practice for her that she does in communion with God as a creative spirit.
- Friends Journal is still looking for articles about attitudes toward Quaker founder George Fox as we mark the 400th anniversary of his birth. How do we appreciate him? Misuse him? Ignore him? Does he unite or divide us all these centuries later? The deadline is March 25. Learn more here.
- A new installment of Windy Cooler’s series on public ministers is available on the FGC website. This time she, Ashley Wilcox, and Katie Breslin ask How are Meetings and Quaker Institutions Supporting Public Ministry? I’ve written about parts one and two of this series before.
The New Quaker Histories
February 8, 2024
I watched a great Zoom talk this week, hosted by Haverford College and featuring Ben Pink Dandelion and Robynne Rogers Healey. The topic was “The New History of Quakerism” and its focus was on the shifts happening in Quaker academic histories since the 1990s. Dandelion did a fantastic job putting the last 150 years of Quaker historiography in context and laying out the positives of more recent developments: more academic rigor, a wider diversity of voices, changing foci of topics, and strong interest by academic publishers.
Healey identified three major fields in which the new histories are challenging what are often comforting apologetics of previous Quaker studies: the equality of women, slavery and indigenous relations, and pacifism. All these are much more complicated than the stories we tell. She then listed three trends: decentering London and Philadelphia, reevaluating the so-called quietist period, and including academics and histories of the Global South.
Dandelion said these changes were “all for the better,” and while I agree wholeheartedly with him in regards to content, there’s one way in which the new publishing opportunities are failing us: to be blunt, price.
Take the Penn State University Press series, “The New History of Quakerism,” that both panelists have written for. The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830 – 1937 edited by Stephen W. Angell, Dandelion, and David Harrington Watt is $125. Quakerism in the Atlantic World, 1690 – 1830 edited by Healey is $90. Quaker Women, 1800 – 1920, edited by Healey and Carole Dale Spencer is $125.
Both Healey and Dandelion acknowledged the problem of inaccessible prices in their talk. Dandelion suggested that meeting libraries might be able to purchase these books but I think that’s more hopeful than realistic. My small meeting certainly couldn’t. I went to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Library and they wouldn’t let me check out The Quaker World (FJ review), the 2022 collection edited by my friends C. Wess Daniels and Rhiannon Grant. It’s got a lot of great authors and I heartily recommend it, but only in absentia because at $250 I’m never going to read it.
As an amateur Quaker history lover, these are all volumes I would love to read, but I’m not writing this because of my own personal anguish (real as it is!) but because the prices are breaking what has been an essential transmission system for new histories. In the late 1980s, Thomas Hamm published The Transformation of American Quakerism, 1800 – 1907 with Indiana University Press. It was $25 and I splurged. It became an important source in my understanding of Quaker divisions and nineteenth-century quietism. Still, decades later, when I write blog posts, or teach Quakerism 101, or answer an online question, I’m often regurgitating perspectives I learned from Hamm.
Go to Facebook, go to Reddit, and people aren’t sharing these groundbreaking histories. Just now, randomly opening Facebook, there’s a post by someone asking about James Nayler, with someone answering it by referencing Hugh Barbour’s mid-1960s history. I love Barbour but he had his own filters and we’ve learned a lot since then.
Every meeting I’ve been a part of had a small number of history nerds in residence who led the Quakerism 101 classes or hosted book groups or Bible study, and they brought their nerdiness to their meeting tasks. To use Healey’s list, many Quakers in the benches still think of Friends’ race relations in terms of abolitionism, still consider early Friends as unalloyed feminists, and rarely give a thought to Friends in the Global South. I recently read a new article about a local meeting that was founded by one of the largest slaveholding families in the area and the only mention of slavery was its much-later anti-slavery society; I really want these kinds of stories to be too embarrassing to publish. Quakers in the benches need the perspectives of these new historians to understand ourselves.
Are there ways that academics can repurpose their inaccessible work so that it can trickle down to a general audience? I’m glad this Zoom talk was open to the public and well publicized: at least some of us could watch it and know the outlines of the changing historiography. But how else can we work to bridge the gap? Blog posts, articles in general publications, podcasts, Pendle Hill pamphlets? What are we doing and what more could we do? I’m in Quaker publishing, obviously, and so part of the problem if there’s a breakdown in transmission. We review the books and QuakerSpeak often dives into history. My friend Jon Watts’s Thee Quaker podcast has some wonderfully nerdy episodes. But all these feel like snippets: ten minutes here, 2000 words there. When I go to learn more, I’m stuck by the limitations of the open internet, caught in JSTOR articles I can’t access, or histories only available in print for $100-plus.
I’m not blaming anyone here. I understand we’re all caught in these capitalist and academic systems. I just wonder what we can do.
Also, special shoutout to Rhiannon Grant, who is the only Quaker academic I know of who is seemingly everywhere: Blog, articles in FJ, installments in the “Quaker Quicks” series, podcast segments on the BBC and Thee Quaker (she even guested on one of my FJ author chats!). Plus she’s on Mastodon, Bluesky, and TikTok and has her own welcome-to-Quakers page. I don’t think this ubiquitous approach is at all replicable for other academics. Even I’m not a proponent of social media ubiquity, preferring to focus on a few platforms.
Quaker dreaming
February 7, 2024
A great article by Marcelle Martin in this month’s Friends Journal: Quaker Dreams. I love the story of Margaret Fell being prepared for the wild entrance of George Fox by way of a dream. And Robert Pyle’s image-rich dream that led him to abolitionism is truly amazing. I also appreciate Martin’s exploration of more recent Quaker dream work. I interviewed her this week in an FJ Author Chat: