July 2005 Archives

A guest piece by Evan Welkin

Shortly after finishing my second year at Guilford College, I set out to understand what brought me there. During the stressful process of deciding which college to attend, I felt a strong but slightly mysterious urge to explore Quakerism in my undergraduate years. Two years later, this same urge led me to buy a motorcycle, learn to ride it, and set out in a spiritual journey up the Eastern seaboard visiting Quaker meetings. While Guilford had excited and even irritated my curiosity about the workings of Quakerism, I knew little about how Quakers were over a large area of the country. I wanted to find out how Quakers worked as a group across a wide area of the country, and if I could learn how to be a leader within that community.

Over at the BarclayPress site there are a number of great articles on emergent church from the perspective of Evangelical Friends

I've just discovered that the reason there haven't been any recent comments is that the commenting system is broken. Ack! The dangers of downloading beta software the day it's available. Working on it... Working: they should be back now. Email me if you have any continuing problems.

Now that the evidence is building that the Plame outing was a political dirty trick from one of the top White House aid, should we really be sorry for jailed reporter Judith Miller? Is she really being so righteous in protecting her sources? She knew Karl Rove was using her to discredit an outspoken critic of the Administration's claims on iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Judith Miller was one of the Bush Administration's favorite reporters over the time it was trying to sell a second iraq war to the American people. She never heard an iraqi tall tale that she didn't believe and she frequently regurgitated the outlandish stories not only of White House insiders like Karl Rove but also shady iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi.

Was Judith Miller really so naive? Or was she consciously engaged in selling the war to New York Times readers? Was she being partisan herself? We expect a certain amount of objectivity and critical thinking in the pieces from a paper of the stature of the New York Times but we rarely saw that in Judith Miller's reporting. At what point does a reporter become the mouthpiece of policiticans?

Howard Kurtz at the post compares current events to Watergate:

Unlike Deep Throat, who was risking his FBI career by telling Woodward about the Nixon spying operation and cover-upRove and whoever else leaked Valerie Plame's CIA connection to Novak and other journalists were doing partisan dirty work, and some may have been committing a crime. Cooper and others have argued that they can't make a distinction between "good guy" and "bad guy" sources -- a promise is a promise -- but helping White House officials finger a covert operative is not exactly the kind of work that builds public support for the Fourth Estate.

Rove posing as a patriot

There's evidence that one of President Bush's key aids was involved with the leak that revealed a CIA agent's identity. Republican political hack Karl Rove is being named as someone who told Time Magazine that a whistleblower against the Bush's weapons of mass destructions lies was a CIA agent. More background of the story from two years ago, White House treasonable dirty tricks against whistleblower's wife.

The first question: are we surprised? Of course the smear campaign was orchestrated out of the White House. The whole war has everything to do with politics. Facts were inconveniences when it came to building a case against iraq. We now know that the decade of sanctions against Saddam Hussein worked. His military was a shambles and he had no money to engage in researching or building weapons of mass destruction. The war was a political ploy by the White House. It propped up the President and kept terrorism in the spotlight. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the London bombings were carried out by iraqi insurgents, people who might not be terrorists if we hadn't gone and invaded iraq (yes, there were terrorist before but every act of violence inspires acts of counter-violence).

Karl Rove's job has been to get George W. Bush elected and then re-elected. The role of political consultants is supposed to stop there. The job of governance and statemanship should be left to the President himself. This Administration is more overtly political than any in recent history. Why was Karl Rove selling the war against iraq?

I'm away from my usual haunts on work-related duties but the news sites have plenty of articles about the horrible bombings in London; there is no need for yet another list.

It is always tragic to see the cycles of violence, terrorism and state-sponsored war feeding one another to new acts of violence. Our prayers that the new round of heartbreaks in London don't lead into a kind of retaliation that will only harden hearts elsewhere. We need to envision a new world, one based on love and mutual respect. It's impossible to negotiate with the kind of terrorists that would bomb a packed bus but we can be a witness that hate can be confronted with love. We must bandage our wounded, mourn our dead and continue to build a world where the occasions for all war have been transcended.

Two of the blasts that hit London today were near Friends House, the home of Britain Yearly Meeting, which is acting as a relief center. From TimesOnline

Ministers and priests went on to the streets to work alongside the emergency services, helping to comfort traumatised commuters. At Friends House, opposite Euston Station, Quakers set up an emergency unit for the hundreds of people blocked in the middle of the explosions at Kings Cross, Woburn Place and Russell Square.

The Quakers offered free tea, coffee and telephone calls to all the people affected by the blasts as well as emotional support. Many of the hundreds of people stuck in Euston were witness to the explosions, with one young woman describing how she saw the bus explode and thought it was another 9/11.

She has become partially deaf and is resting in the Quaker First Aid room.

The hundreds of people who are in Friends House remain stuck there for the foreseeable future and many are unsure how they will return home tonight.

Friends House also gets a mention in this Guardian piece

Responses from the Quaker Blogosphere:

Rob of Consider the Lillies is okay and is posting reactions. The Contemplative Activist reminds us to live in that virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars'. Peterson Toscano wonders if the bombings really are senseless in light of our cultural attitudes--"You push me; I push you harder; you push me back, and it goes on and on and on." Beppe turns to a recent passage from his scripture study to gage just what Jesus might have done. I will try to continue updating these responses as they come in.

Our prayers are with all those in London today: the dead, the injured, the scared. And with those whose fear turns to anger and will inevitably lead to calls for retribution. Our Friends Peace Testimony helps us keep our groundedness in times of horror and I am grateful to hear that Friends are there, ready to tend to the wounded of body and soul.

Elsewhere

Apparently Wikipedia is now covering news and is one of the better sources of information on the London bombings.

Over on Beppeblog Joe dreams of daily web coverage of the FGC Gathering. Well, FGC's not paying its webmaster (me, for now) for such service but I'll try to sneak in a few posts between bookstore customers. The bookstore set-up was remarkably easy. There was no truck crisis, no computer crisis, no getting lost on highways.

As regular readers will know, I'm leading a workshop called Strangers to the Covenant with Zachary Moon and this morning was the first workshop. Although it was billed as a workshop for high school students and adult young Friend (so 15-35 years old), though almost all of the participants are high schoolers (what does that mean?). It seems like a great bunch. I arrived about fifteen minutes early to center in worship; two of the attenders came in the room and sat with me and one by one everyone came in and joined the worship. I had to wonder if a group of older Friends would have been able to resist the temptation to ask about each other's jewelry, complain about the air conditioning, etc.

Julie reports that the cafeteria food is good. We've also been happy patrons of Gillie's and Bollo's Cafe.

A workshop led by Zachary Moon and Martin Kelley at the 2005 FGC Gathering of Friends

This is for Young Friends who want to break into the power of Quakerism: it’s the stuff you didn’t get in First Day School. Connecting with historical Quakers whose powerful ministry came in their teens and twenties, we’ll look at how Friends wove God, covenants and gospel order together to build a movement that rocked the world. We’ll mine Quaker history to reclaim the power of our tradition, to explore the living testimonies and our witness in the world. (P/T)