Recently in books Category

Not really news, but Friends United Meeting recently dedicated their new Welcome Center in what was once the FUM bookstore:

On September 15, 2007, FUM dedicated the space once used as the Quaker Hill Bookstore as the new FUM Welcome Center. The Welcome Center contains Quaker books and resources for F/friends to stop by and make use of during business hours. Tables and chairs to comfortably accommodate 50 people make this a great space to rent for reunions, church groups, meetings, anniversary/birthday parties, etc. Reduced prices are available for churches.

Most Quaker publishers and booksellers have closed or been greatly reduced over the last ten years. Great changes have occurred in the Philadelphia-area Pendle Hill bookstore and publishing operation, the AFSC Bookstore in Southern California, Barclay Press in Oregon. The veritable Friends Bookshop in London farmed out its mail order business a few years ago and has seen part of its space taken over by a coffeebar: popular and cool I'm sure, but does London really needs another place to buy coffee? Rumor has it that Britain's publications committee has been laid down. The official spin is usually that the work continues in a different form but only Barclay Press has been reborn as something really cool. One of the few remaining booksellers is my old pals at FGC's QuakerBooks: still selling good books but I'm worried that so much of Quaker publishing is now in one basket and I'd be more confident if their website showed more signs of activity.

The boards making these decisions to scale back or close are probably unaware that they're part of a larger trend. They probably think they're responding to unique situations (the peer group Quakers Uniting in Publications sends internal emails around but hasn't done much to publicize this story outside of its membership). It's sad to see that so many Quaker decision-making bodies have independently decided that publishing is not an essential part of their mission.

Geeky readers out there might want to know that Google Books is now making many of its out-of-print collection available as downloadable and printable PDFs. They list 42,500 entries under Society of Friends I’m unsure whether this is books with that phrase or pages inside books with that phrase, but either way that’s a lot of reading. A quick breeze turns up some good titles. Thanks to Tech Crunch for the Google news. Older online book projects worth a mention: Project Gutenberg the Christian Classics Etherial Library and the Earlham School of Religion’s useful but clunky Digital Quaker Collection.

Just a quick note to everyone that I haven’t posted more lately. It’s a busy time of the year. I’ve had my hands full keeping up with articles and links to the Christian Peacemakers.

I’ve also been doing some freelance sites. One is launched: Quakersong.org, the new online home of Annie Patterson and Peter Blood of Rise Up Singing fame. It’s just the start to what should soon be an interesting site.

Geek-wise I’ve been interested in the Web 2.0 stuff (see this Best Of list of sites, link courtesy C Wess Daniels). I’ve talked about some of this back in June but it’s getting more exciting. In the Fall I was asked to submit a proposal for redoing the website of a Quaker conference center near Philadelphia and it was all Web 2.0-centric—maybe too much so as I didn’t get the job! I’ll post an edited version of the proposal soon for the geeks out there. Some of the new tech stuff will undergird a fabulous new Quakerfinder.org feature that will allow isolated Friends to connect to form new worship groups (to launch soon) and even more is behind the dreams of a new Quakerbooks.org site.

In the meantime, I encourage everyone to order On Living with a Concern for Gospel Ministry, the new book by New England Yearly Meeting’s Brian Drayton (it arrived from the printers yesterday). It’s being billed as a modern day version of “A Description of the Qualifications” and if it lives up the hype it should be an important book for the stirrings of deepening faithfulness we’ve been seeing among Quakers lately. While you’re waiting for the book to arrive in your mailbox, check out Brooklyn Rich’s Testing Leadings post.

Quaker Storytelling as Religious Ed: how do you teach a religion that can’t be defined?

Howard Brinton’s Quaker Journals: Varieties of Religious Experience Among Friends

A recent email correspondence confirmed that all of our wonderful websites aren’t always reaching the people who should be hearing this message. Self publishing a book is almost as easy as starting a blog so why not put together a booklet of a website’s essays? You can order the first edition of the Quaker Ranter Reader for $12.00 through Cafepress (a few dollars of each sale comes back to me to support the website). The Reader is also available from Quakerbooks of FGC.

On the train this morning I read Elizabeth Cazden’s Fellowships, Conferences and Associations: The Limits of the Liberal Quaker Reinvention of Meeting Polity. This 36 page pamphlet is a must-read for all of us Quaker Ranters.

In Fall 2005 I led a six-week Quakerism 101 course at Medford (NJ) Monthly Meeting. It went very well. Medford has a lot of involved, weighty Friends (some of them past yearly meeting clerks!) and I think they appreciated a fresh take on an introductory course. The core question: how might we teach Quakerism today?

Quakers Uniting in Publications, better known as “QUIP”, is a collection of 50 Quaker publishers, booksellers and authors committed to the “ministry of the written word.” I often think of QUIP as a support group of sorts for those of us who really believe that publishing can make a difference. It’s also one of those places where different branches of Friends come together to work and tell stories. QUIP sessions strike a nice balance between work and unstructured time, it’s has its own nice culture of friendliness and cooperation that are the real reason many of us go every year.

Just finished a quick read of Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” I remember devouring some of the original pieces in The New Yorker and was thrilled when a friend loaned me a copy of the book.

Colleen Carroll’s book The New Faithful is an attempt to examine the religious phenomenon of Christian theological “orthodoxy” among current twenty and thirty-somethings. We purchased this book out of a sense of longing to hear the stories of fellow young Christians sympathetic to the issues we face. We opened The New Faithful eager to hear the voice of someone in our age bracket crying from the rooftops. But her book is hardly unproblematic: she weakened the book when she decided to make it a Republican-Party calling card…

Tough question in the bookstore today: a customer called asking for books about the connection between Friends and Anabaptists. Remarkably, we couldn’t come up with much of a list. But let’s be interactive here, readers! What books did I forget about? And what’s this phenomena of denying Quaker/Anabaptist common roots and cross-pollination?

A review of Michael Sheeran’s “Beyond Majority Rule”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/0-941308-04-9. Twenty years later, do Friends need to experience the gathered condition?

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Next on my list to read: Spencer Burke’s “Making Sense of Church”:http://www.makingsenseofchurch.com/. Spencer is the co-founder of “TheOoze”:http://www.theooze.com/ (which recently added a link to this site!) and this is his distillation of the Emergent Church movement. Jordan Cooper gave it a “very positive review”:www.jordoncooper.com/20031101_archives.html#106817797834830046 today, which convinces me to read it.

For anyone keeping track, my current reading is:

• Robert E. Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals (“read my initial take”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000136.php) and
• Paul Lacey’s pamphlet …The Authority of Our Meetings Is the Power of God, which I’m reading on “Kenneth Sutton’s recommendation”:http://kenneth.typepad.com/blog/2003/10/theauthorityo.html. I’m only half-way through but it’s surprisingly good so far.

Quaker story of the day: Julie & I went to a lawyer’s office to do wills, etc. He’s the same person who handled her grandfather’s estate so they know each other pretty well. He had made sure the language said that we declare rather than swear, remembering our Quaker scruples on the terminology. When we said we were having difficulties with Friends (and that Julie had left completely), he was surprised and asked why: “I thought with Quakers you can believe anything you want, right?” Honestly, that’s true for most Meetings. I’ve heard the same thing said many times in Quaker Meetings. Someday when I have time I’ll have to post about all the reasons I named this site “Martin Kelley Ranter.”