I am a South Jersey Friend and dad with a love out of outreach and a passion for looking afresh at Friends' testimonies, language and practices. I am the publisher of Quaker Quaker, a community site for Friends, and write about online publicity, organizing and design on my business site at MartinKelley.com.
Quaker
I don't know enough of the details of their lives to write the obituary (a Wikipedia page was started this morning) but I will say they always seemed to me like the Forrest Gump's of peace activism--at the center of every cool peace witness since 1950. You squint to look at the photos at there's George and Lil, always there. Or maybe pop music would give us the better analogy: you know how there are entire b-rate bands that carve an entire career around endlessly rehashing a particular Beatles song? Well, there are whole activist organizations that are built around particular campaigns that the Willoughby's championed. Like: in 1958 George was a crew member of the Golden Rule (profiled a bit here), a boatload of crazy activists who sailed into a Pacific nuclear bomb test to disrupt it. Twelve years later some Vancouver activists stage a copycat boat sailing which became Greenpeace. Lillian was concerned about rising violence against women and started one of the first Take Back the Night marches. If you've ever sat in an activist meeting where everyone's using consensus, then you've been influenced by the Willoughby's!
For many years I lived deeply embedded in communities they helped create. There's a recent interview with George Lakey about the founding of Movement for a New Society that he and they helped create. In the 1990s I liked to say how I lived "in its ruins," working at the publishing house, living in a coop house and getting my food from the coop that all grew out of MNS. I got to know the Willoughbys through Central Philadelphia meeting but also as friends. It was a treat to visit their house in Deptford, NJ--it adjoined a wildlife sanctuary they helped protect against the strip-mall sprawl that is the rest of that town. I last saw George a few months ago and while he had a bit of trouble remembering who I was, that irrepressible smile and spirit were very strong!
I've written before that the closest modern-day successor to the Movement for a New Society is the so-called New Monastic movement--explicitly Christian but focused on love and charity and often very Quaker'ish. Our culture of secular Quakerism has kept Friends from getting involved and sharing our decades of experience. Now that Shane Claiborne is being invited to seemingly every liberal Quaker venue, maybe it's a good opportunity to look back on our own legacy. Friends like George and Lillian invented this form. I've just signed up for Beacon Hill's Friends House's Quaker Studies class on "Moodle, Technique / Technology" that begins First Month 12.
An educator F/friend of mine has gushed on about Moodle, the open
source education system and I have to admit it's always looked intriguing. I've taught a
number of real-world Quakerism classes
and I've wondered whether online courses could help connect Friends and
seekers isolated by distance or theology. I've been wanting to try out
one of Beacon Hill's online classes for awhile.
From the description:
Is online teaching new to you?
Don't know where to start?
We'll begin with the simplest interactive course: a "welcome to the class" section with a reading and one forum. We'll talk about technology: how settings change the forum interface; but we'll also discuss teaching technique: how to present introductory material to students who may have a wide range of experience and expectations.
Over the 10 weeks, we'll cover: introducing the moodle environment; chats; forums; choices and surveys; lessons; assignments; databases; wikis; quizzes.
You will have your own lesson space to explore all these tools and will be expected to look at each other's work and react to it. By March we should all be ready to design and offer creative Moodle courses of our own.
Classes only cost $25. You can find out more about the Beacon Hill's Moodle online class and all their Quaker Studies classes. If anyone would be interested in some sort of QuakerQuaker-sponsored classes, let me know. We've got a lot of well-qualified Quaker teachers in the network and a lot of isolated Friends wanting to learn more.
Just finished: Kenneth S.P. Morse's "A History of Conservative Friends" from 1962. Like most histories of Conservative Friends, it's both heartening and depressing. It's great to read the quotes, which often put the dilemma very clearly, like this one from Iowa Friends in 1877:In consideration of many and various departures in Doctrine, Principle and Practice, brought into our beloved Society of late years by modern innovators, who have so revolutionized our ancient order in the Church, as to run into views and practices out of which our early Friends were lead, and into a broader, and more self-pleasing, and cross-shunning way than that marked out by our Savior, and held to by our ancient Friends.... And who have so approximated to the unregenerate world that we feel it incumbent upon us to bear testimony...and sustain the Church for the purpose for which is was peculiarly raised up.I love this stuff. You've got theology, polity, culture and an argument for the eternal truths of the "peculiarly raised" Quaker church. But even in 1962 this is a story of decline, of generations of ministers passing with no one to take their place and monthly and yearly meetings winking out with disarming regularity as the concept of Friends gets stretched from all sides. "It is certainly true that most of those who call themselves Friends at the present time are only partial Friends in that they seem not to have felt called to uphold various branches of the Quaker doctrine."
Putting the book down the most remarkable fact is that there are any Conservative Friends around still around almost fifty years later.
The task of sharing and upholding the Quaker doctrine is still almost impossibly hard. The multiplicity of meanings in the words we use become stumbling blocks in themselves. Friends from other traditions are often the worst, often being blind to their own innovations, oftener still just not caring that they don't share much in common with early Friends.
Then there's the disunity among present-day Conservatives. Geography plays a part but it seems part of the culture. The history is a maze of traditionalist splinter groups with carefully-selected lists of who they do and do not correspond with. Today the three Conservative Yearly Meetings seem to know each another more through carefully-parsed reading of histories than actual visitation (there is some, not enough). There's also the human messiness of it all: some of the flakiest liberal Quakers I've known have been part of Conservative Yearly Meetings and the internet is full of those who share Conservative Friends values but have no yearly meeting to join.
No answers today from me. Maybe we should take solace that despite the travails and the history of defeat, there still remains a spark and there are those who still seek to share Friends' ways. For those wanting to learn more the more recent "Short History of Conservative Friends" (1992) is online and a good introduction.
Betsy is a graduate of the Quaker program at Guilford (so she was a good followup for Max Carter's talk this weekend) and she helped organize the World Gathering of Young Friends a few years ago. The talk was recorded and should be up on the Pendle Hill shortly (I'll add a link when it is) so I'll not try to be comprehensive but just share a few of my impressions.
Betsy is the kind of person that can just come under the radar. She starts telling stories, funny and poignant by turn, each one a Betsy story that you take on its own merits. It's only at the end of the hour that you fully realize she's been testifying to the presence of Jesus in her life in all this time. Real-life sightings, comforting hands on shoulders family tragedy, intellectual doubts and expanded spiritual connections all come together like different sides of the elephant.
One theme that came up a few times in the question-and-answer section is the feeling of a kind of spiritual tiredness--a fatigue from running the same old debates over and over. It's an exhaustion that squelches curiosity about other Friends and sometimes moves us to follow the easy path in times of conflict rather than the time-consuming & difficult path that might be the one we need to be on.
The last time I was in the Pendle Hill barn it was to listen to Shane Claiborne. I'm one of those odd people that don't think he's a very good speaker for liberal Quakers. He downplays the religious instruction he received as a child to emphasize the progressive spiritual smörgåsbord of his adulthood without ever quite realizing (I think) that this early education gave him the language and vocabulary to ground his current spiritual travels. Those who grow up in liberal Quaker meetings generally start with the dabbling; their challenge is to find a way to go deeper into a specific spiritual practice, something that can't be done on weekend trips to cool spiritual destinations.
Betsy brought an appreciation for her grounded Christian upbringing that I thought was a more powerful message. She talked about how her mom was raised in a tradition that could talk of darkness. When a family member died and doubt of God naturally followed, her mother was able to remind her that God had healed the beloved sister, only "not in the way we wanted." Powerful stuff.
The sounds at Pendle Hill were fascinating: the sound of knitting needles was a gentle click-clack through the time. And one annoying speaker rose at one point with an annoying sermonette that I realized was a modern-day version of Quaker singsong (liberal Friend edition), complete with dramatic pauses and over-melodious delivery. Funny to realize it exists in such an unlikely place!
And a plug that the Tuesday night speaker's series continues with some great Friends coming up, with North Carolina's Lloyd Lee Wilson at bat for next week. Hey, and I'll be there with Wess Daniels this May to lead a workshop on "The New Monastics and Convergent Friends."
Max's program at Guilford is one of the recipients of the Bible Association's efforts and he began by joking that his sole qualification for speaking at their annual meeting was that he was one of their more active customers.
Many of the students going through Max's program grew up in the bigger East Coast yearly meetings. In these settings, being an involved Quaker teen means regularly going to camps like Catoctin and Onas, doing the FGC Gathering every year and having a parent on an important yearly meeting committee. "Quaker" is a specific group of friends and a set of guidelines about how to live in this subculture. Knowing the rules to Wink and being able to craft a suggestive question for Great Wind Blows is more important than even rudimentary Bible literacy, let alone Barclay's Catechism. The knowledge of George Fox rarely extends much past the song ("with his shaggy shaggy locks"). So there's a real culture shock when they show up in Max's class and he hands them a Bible. "I've never touched one of these before" and "Why do we have to use this?" are non-uncommon responses.
None of this surprised me, of course. I've led high school workshops at Gathering and for yearly meeting teens. Great kids, all of them, but most of them have been really shortchanged in the context of their faith. The Guilford program is a good introduction ("we graduate more Quakers than we bring in" was how Max put it) but do we really want them to wait so long? And to have so relatively few get this chance. Where's the balance between letting them choose for themselves and giving them the information on which to make a choice?
There was a sort of built-in irony to the scene. Most of the thirty-five or so attendees at the Moorestown talk were half-a-century older than the students Max was profiling. I pretty safe to say I was the youngest person there. It doesn't seem healthy to have such separated worlds.
Convergent Friends
Max did talk for a few minutes about Convergent Friends. I think we've shaken hands a few times but he didn't recognize me so it was a rare fly-on-wall opportunity to see firsthand how we're described. It was positive (we "bear watching!") but there were a few minor mis-perceptions. The most worrisome is that we're a group of young adult Friends. At 42, I've graduated from even the most expansive definition of YAF and so have many of the other Convergent Friends (on a Facebook thread LizOpp made the mistake of listed all of the older Convergent Friends and touched off a little mock outrage--I'm going to steer clear of that mistake!). After the talk one attendee (a New Foundation Fellowship regular) came up and said that she had been thinking of going to the "New Monastics and Convergent Friends" workshop C Wess Daniels and I are co-leading next May but had second-thoughts hearing that CF's were young adults. "That's the first I've heard that" she said; "me too!" I replied and encouraged her to come. We definitely need to continue to talk about how C.F. represents an attitude and includes many who were doing the work long before Robin Mohr's October 2006 Friends Journal article brought it to wider attention.
Techniques for Teaching the Bible and Quakerism
The most useful part of Max's talk was the end, where he shared what he thought were lessons of the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program. He
- Demystify the Bible: a great percentage of incoming students to the QLSP had never touched it so it seemed foreign;
- Make it fun: he has a newsletter column called "Concordance Capers" that digs into the derivation of pop culture references of Biblical phrases; he often shows Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" at the end of the class.
- Make it relevant: Give interested students the tools and guidance to start reading it.
- Show the genealogy: Start with the parts that are most obviously Quaker: John and the inner Light, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.
- Contemporary examples: Link to contemporary groups that are living a radical Christian witness today. This past semester they talked about the New Monastic movement, for example and they've profiled the Simple Way and Atlanta's Open Door.
- The Bible as human condition: how is the Bible a story that we can be a part of, an inspiration rather than a literalist authority.
A couple of thoughts have been churning through my head since the talk: one is how to scale this up. How could we have more of this kind of work happening at the local yearly meeting level and start with younger Friends: middle school or high schoolers? And what about bringing convinced Friends on board? Most QLSP students are born Quaker and come from prominent-enough families to get meeting letters of recommendation to enter the program. Graduates of the QLSP are funneled into various Quaker positions these days, leaving out convinced Friends (like me and like most of the central Convergent Friends figures). I talked about this divide a lot back in the 1990s when I was trying to pull together the mostly-convinced Central Philadelphia Meeting young adult community with the mostly-birthright official yearly meeting YAF group. I was convinced then and am even more convinced now that no renewal will happen unless we can get these complementary perspectives and energies working together.
PS: Due to a conflict between Feedburner and Disqus, some of comments are here (Wess and Lizopp), here (Robin M) and here (Chris M). I think I've fixed it so that this odd spread won't happen again.
ONE YEAR AGO: The Not-Quite-So Young Quakers
It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool
new movement I had been reading about. It would have been Jordan Cooper's blog that turned me onto Robert E Webber's The Younger Evangelicals, a look at generational shifts among American Evangelicals. In retrospect, it's fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here's Robin M's account of first reading it) and it's follow-up We're All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it).
And yet? All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can't think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. I'm really sad to say we're still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I've recently crossed my life's halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change. How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in "Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers". Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work--in 2008?!?
Published 9/14/2008.
FIVE YEARS AGO: Vanity Googling of Causes
A poster to an obscure discussion board recently described typing a particular search phrase into Google and finding nothing but bad information. Reproducing the search I determined two things: 1) that my site topped the list and 2) that the results were actually quite accurate. I've been hearing an increasing number of stories like this. "Cause Googling," a variation on "vanity googling," is suddenly becoming quite popular. But the interesting thing is that these new searchers don't actually seem curious about the results. Has Google become our new proof text?TEN'ISH YEARS AGO: War Time Again
Published 10/2/2004 in The Quaker Ranter.
This piece is about the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia (Wikipedia). It's strange to see I was feeling war fatigue even before 9/11 and the "real" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There's a great danger in all this. A danger to the soul of America. This is the fourth country the U.S. has gone to war against in the last six months. War is becoming routine. It is sandwiched between the soap operas and the sitcoms, between the traffic and weather reports. Intense cruise missile bombardments are carried out but have no effect on the psyche or even imagination of the U.S. citizens.
It's as if war itself has become another consumer good. Another event to be packaged for commercial television. Given a theme song. We're at war with a country we don't know over a region we don't really care about. I'm not be facetious, I'm simply stating a fact. The United States can and should play an active peacemaking role in the region, but only after we've done our homework and have basic knowledge of the players and situation. Isolationism is dangerous, yes, but not nearly as dangerous as the emerging culture of these dilettante made-for-TV wars.
Published March 25, 1999, Nonviolence.org
Had a good time with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting high school Friends yesterday, two mini-session on the testimonies in the middle of their end-of-summer gathering. The second session was an attempt at a write-your-own testimonies exercise, fueled by my testimonies-as-wiki idea and grounded by passages from an 1843 Book of Discipline and Thomas Clarkson's "Portraiture". My hope was that by reverse-engineering the old testimonies we might get an appreciation for their spiritual focus. The exercise needs a bit of tweaking but I'll try to fix it up and write it out in case others want to try it with local Friends.The invite came when the program coordinator googled "quaker testimonies" and found the video below (loose transcript is here):
The primary sense seems to have been "beloved, friend"; which in some languages (notably Germanic and Celtic) developed a sense of "free," perhaps from the terms "beloved" or "friend" being applied to the free members of one's clan (as opposed to slaves). (P. 18)This double-meaning of beloved and free made friend the perfect word for the early translators of the English bible when they got to John 15, where Jesus says:
Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and [that] your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. These things I command you, that ye love one another.This was a favorite verse of a bunch of spiritual trouble-makers in England in mid-1600s, who liked it so much they started calling one another Friends. They were a new brother- and sister-hood of beloveds, newly freed of the tyrants of their age by their personal experience of Christ as friend, spreading the good news that we were all free and all commanded to love one another.

Pictures from this weekend's gathering of Conservative Friends (Quakers), held in Lancaster County PA and hosted by Keystone Fellowship Friends Meeting of Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative.
Videos:
Arthur Berk on "Basic Christian Quakerism"
The Convincement Story of John L.: a particularly interesting story of a family's journey from the LDS (Mormon) Church to Friends.
The answer isn't to give up testimonies or to hold onto them even tighter, but instead to constantly remind ourselves about their purpose: to learn how to live as an attentive people of God. Here's what I wrote on Facebook:
I've been a mostly bicycle-riding vegan for decades, an outspoken pacifist and a frequent plain dresser. All of these practices have aided my spiritual growth but also have unearthed new sources of pride for me to wrestle with. The self-examination has been practice in discernment.
I often think back to the story of the Good Samaritan. What mattered wasn't how he was dressed or whether he was riding a bicycle. No, what mattered is that he knew enough to know he was being called to sacrifice something: to get covered in a strangers blood, to aid someone who might resent him for it, to lose money he had earned to put someone up for the night. Maybe he had practiced this discernment of self-sacrifice by living a testimony that had challenged him to navigate between loss and pride, and maybe he had been brought up in a community where the value of love was prized above all. The important thing is he knew to stop and be a true neighbor.
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- For something completely different.... In the news front, I'm no longer working at FGC. Reasons are complicated, as is often the case. In eight... October 2, 2006 11:38 AM. View Comments
- Munching on the wheat. There have been a few recent posts about the state of the Quaker blogosphere. New blogger Richard M wrote about... September 2, 2006 8:30 AM. View Comments
- More classic Quaker books available online. Geeky readers out there might want to know that Google Books is now making many of its out-of-print collection available... August 30, 2006 9:03 AM. View Comments
- Making New Factions. Strangely enough, the Philadelphia Inquirer has published a front-page article on leadership in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Friends frustrate some of... August 22, 2006 7:54 PM. View Comments
- Reading Woolman part three: 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"... August 17, 2006 12:30 AM. View Comments
- Turning workshops into worship. Last night LizOpp, Robin M and myself hosted our FGC Gathering interest group. The title was "On Fire!: Renewing Quakerism... July 4, 2006 4:46 PM. View Comments
- Why would a Quaker do a crazy thing like that?. Looking back at Friends' responses to the Christian Peacemaker hostages When four Christian Peacemakers were taken hostage in Iraq late... June 10, 2006 10:40 AM. View Comments
- Packing our own bags at the checkout line. Over on Beppeblog, Liberal Quakerism is no longer Quakerism, the first of a multi-post series. In part one, Beppe looks... May 30, 2006 9:03 AM. View Comments
- The bully, the Friend and the Christian. Lazy guy I am, I'm going to cut-and-paste a comment I left over at Rich the Brooklyn Quaker's blog in... April 21, 2006 3:51 PM. View Comments
- What is this QuakerQuaker thing?. There's been some head-scratching going on about QuakerQuaker over the last few weeks. In the service of transparency I've posted... March 29, 2006 5:11 PM. View Comments
- Love is unconditional and accepts us for who we are. I tried to post this as a comment on this piece by James Riemermann on the Nontheist Friends website but... March 15, 2006 1:06 PM. View Comments
- A time of sadness and prayer. Sad news coming over the internet: after 100 days of captivity, Christian Peacemaker Tom Fox was found dead yesterday in... March 11, 2006 7:18 AM. View Comments
- Giuseppe Beppe: Il podcast della famiglia. Sorry for the quiet on the blog front. I've been busy, busy. My Second Month has seen an FGC committee... February 24, 2006 2:19 PM. View Comments
- QuakerQuaker.org, new home to the blog watch. I've moved the Quaker Blog Watch material to a new website, QuakerQuaker.org. It's more-or-less the same material with more-or-less the... January 3, 2006 4:28 PM. View Comments
- "Food for Fire" workshop at Powell House. In early February I'm leading a young adult workshop up at New York Yearly Meeting's Powell House. I don't have... December 27, 2005 4:09 PM. View Comments
- Confusing "Quaker Faith" for God and worshipping ourselves. Sometimes my Quaker Ranter posts dry up for awhile. I console myself that I'm doing enough giving out the daily... November 9, 2005 7:19 PM. View Comments
- Quaker Blog Watch by email. It started when I began bookmarking the more interesting Quaker posts I ran across over the course of the day.... October 18, 2005 4:01 PM. View Comments
- Two Years of the Quaker Ranter and Quaker Blogs. An amazing thing has happened in the last two years: we've got Friends from the corners of Quakerism sharing our... October 10, 2005 5:22 PM. View Comments
- Add Quaker Blog Watch to your site. A few months ago I started keeping a links blog that evolved into the "Quaker Blog Watch" (formally at home... August 16, 2005 5:53 PM. View Comments
- Twenty First Century traveling ministry: of uberQuakers, selfish Friends and the search for unity. A guest piece by Evan Welkin Shortly after finishing my second year at Guilford College, I set out to understand... July 28, 2005 5:11 PM. View Comments
- Strangers to the Covenant. A workshop led by Zachary Moon and Martin Kelley at the 2005 FGC Gathering of Friends This is for Young... July 1, 2005 6:40 PM. View Comments
- Aggregating our Webs. On electronic fellowships, online magazines and the freedom of this patchwork of independent cross-linked blogs: "Maybe the web's form of... June 16, 2005 2:01 PM. View Comments
- On the Web: Where's that Power of the Lord?. The new Quaker Life has an article by Charles W. Heavilin asking Where's the Power of the Lord Now? In... June 16, 2005 1:41 PM. View Comments
- Plain Quaker Nurse-In. I recently read a New York Times article on the resurging phenomenon of nurse-ins, designed to highlight the lack of... June 16, 2005 10:21 AM. View Comments
- I don't have anything to say (either). Summer visitations got an early start last month when the Northeast US Quaker blogroll converged in my back yard with... June 3, 2005 6:36 PM. View Comments
- Quaker Map Hack. To the best of my knowledge this is the first Quaker Google Maps hack, showing the meetinghouses of downtown Philadelphia.... May 26, 2005 4:49 PM. View Comments
- Witness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings. For those that might not have noticed, I have an article in the latest issue of the awkwardly-named FGConnections: Witness... May 16, 2005 8:58 PM. View Comments
- Claire: Friends Familiar with My Struggles. A Guest Piece from 'Quakerspeak' Claire Reddy. "As young Friends move through high school and enter the [young] adult world,... May 5, 2005 2:15 PM. View Comments
- Jeffrey Hipp: My Feet Are on Solid Ground. A Guest Piece by Jeffrey Hipp "I take this commitment of membership very seriously – to labor, nurture, support and... May 2, 2005 7:04 PM. View Comments
- Net Sightings. The Public Quaker writing about prayer Prayer is one constant thing for me, a reliable base. When am I having... May 2, 2005 2:20 PM. View Comments
- Youth Ministries 2: What Do Young Friends Want?. I was given permission to pass along this data from the FGC-sponsored Youth Ministry Consultation that took place Third Month.... April 28, 2005 3:31 PM. View Comments
- The Loss of a Faithful Servant. A humble giant among modern Friends passed away this weekend: Bill Taber. All of us doing the work of mapping... April 18, 2005 12:52 PM. View Comments
- James R: I Am What I Am. By James Riemermann Here's a thought-provoking comment that James left a few days ago on the We're All Ranters Now... April 7, 2005 11:06 AM. View Comments
- Vision for an online magazine. In early 2005, I was nominated to apply for the Clarence and Lilly Pickett Endowment for Quaker Leadership. I decided... April 1, 2005 6:57 PM. View Comments
- A Simple Testimony. I like to rant. I like to break down Quaker sociology. But often I'm quiet about simply testifying to how... March 22, 2005 9:12 PM. View Comments
- Danny: Looking for a Real Religion. Here's an email from Danny, a new friend who I met at last week's FGC-sponsored "Youth Ministries Consultation." I liked... March 21, 2005 9:56 PM. View Comments
- Youth Ministry, Yearly Meeting Style. One has to applaud the sheer honesty of the group of leading Quakers who have recently proposed turning the grounds... March 18, 2005 12:45 PM. View Comments
- It's My Language Now: Thinking About Youth Ministry. This past weekend I took part in a "Youth Ministries Consultation" sponsored by Friends General Conference. Thirty Friends, most under... March 16, 2005 6:06 PM. View Comments
- On the Web: Transmitting Quakerism and Being There for God. Liz Oppenheimer has posted an extraordinary account of how Friends transmitted Quakerism to her over time. I find myself at... March 16, 2005 10:16 AM. View Comments
- QuaCarol: You Don't Want to Be Ranters Anymore. By QuaCarol Sometimes I have to lift up comments and make them their own posts. Here's one of QuaCarol's reply... March 11, 2005 11:20 AM. View Comments
- Uh-Oh: Beppe's Doubts. I've occasionally thought of Beppeblog's Joe Guada as my blogging Quaker doppleganger. More than once he's written the post I... March 9, 2005 8:58 AM. View Comments
- On Dressing Plain. A guest piece from Rob of Consider the Lillies Rob describes himself: "I’m a twenty-something gay Mid-western expatriate living in... March 3, 2005 1:28 PM. View Comments
- Quaker Ranter Reader. A recent email correspondence confirmed that all of our wonderful websites aren't always reaching the people who should be hearing... February 25, 2005 8:42 PM. View Comments
- Quaker Dharma: Let the Light Shine. Over a new-to-me blog called The Quaker Dharma there's a post calling for us to The Let Our Light Shine... February 2, 2005 9:11 AM. View Comments
- Kwakersaur: Jesus vs Christ vs Discernment. Interesting short post from Kwakersaur about the different ways Friends have related to God circa 1660, 1950 and today. A... January 26, 2005 11:03 AM. View Comments
- Selling Quakerism to The Kids. A few weeks ago I got a bulk email from a prominent sixty-something Friend, who wrote that a programmed New... November 23, 2004 9:05 PM. View Comments
- Johan Maurer: More about boldness. Johan has a great post about Quaker evangelizing in Russia that really applies to Quakers reaching out anywhere. My favorite... November 12, 2004 1:59 PM. View Comments
- Quaker Testimonies. One of the more revolutionary transformations of American Quakerism in the twentieth century has been our understanding of the testimonies.... October 15, 2004 4:54 PM. View Comments
- Fellowship Model of Liberal Quakers. On the train this morning I read Elizabeth Cazden's Fellowships, Conferences and Associations: The Limits of the Liberal Quaker Reinvention... September 21, 2004 10:18 AM. View Comments
- Missional Churches and Half-Hearted Welcomes. Over on my main Nonviolence.org blog I link to Punkmonkey's great post, refusing to get political, where he talks about... September 11, 2004 10:28 AM. View Comments
- Buying my Personality in a Store. A guest piece by Amanda Originally posted as a comment to "My Experiments with Plainness", Amanda's story deserves its own... September 8, 2004 12:54 PM. View Comments
- Quakerism 101. In Fall 2005 I led a six-week Quakerism 101 course at Medford (NJ) Monthly Meeting. It went very well. Medford... August 10, 2004 9:35 AM. View Comments
- Quaker Youth Ministry. Incremental vs. Prophetic Since I've written a lot about young adult minstry among Quakers I feel obligated to post the... August 9, 2004 1:35 PM. View Comments
- Gohn Brothers, broadfalls, & men's plain dress. A few years ago I felt led to take up the ancient Quaker testimony of plain dressing. I've spoken elsewhere... July 26, 2004 1:57 AM. View Comments
- Avoiding Plain Dress Designer Clothing. A guest piece by David, originally posted on the Plain and Modest Dress Yahoo Group "Here are a few things... July 21, 2004 11:20 AM. View Comments
- "Conservative Liberal Quakers" and not becoming a least-common-denominator, sentimental faith. This past week I've been wondering whether the best description of my spiritual state is a "conservative liberal Quaker," i.e.,... July 13, 2004 2:04 PM. View Comments
- We Quakers should be cooler than the Sweat Lodge. How did Liberal Friends get to the place where many of our our younger members consider the sweat lodge ceremony... July 5, 2004 3:53 PM. View Comments
- Plain Quaker Dressing at FGC. As we got onto the campus of UMass Amherst to help set up for this year's FGC Gathering, Julie &... July 3, 2004 3:59 PM. View Comments
- Quaker Emergent Church Planting. Over on the Evangelical side of Friends is Simple Churches, a movement of "organic" church planting. It's a project of... May 4, 2004 2:24 PM. View Comments
- How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net. Every once in awhile I get an indication that various "weighty" Quakers come to my "Quaker Ranter" site, usually because... May 3, 2004 8:44 PM. View Comments
- Quaker publications meeting (QUIP) in Indiana. Quakers Uniting in Publications, better known as "QUIP", is a collection of 50 Quaker publishers, booksellers and authors committed to... April 28, 2004 5:44 PM. View Comments
- Plain Dress Discussion on Yahoo. Julie, my wife, has just started a Yahoo group called PlainAndModestDress. Here’s her description: This group is for Christians interested... April 19, 2004 1:43 PM. View Comments
- Plain Dress--Some Reflections. A guest piece by Melynda Huskey When I was a kid, I yearned for plain dress like the kids in... April 7, 2004 6:16 PM. View Comments
- Yearly Meeting Blues. Went to the opening of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's annual sessions yesterday. It's hard to get too excited about it. It... March 25, 2004 11:10 PM. View Comments
- Visit with Christian Friends Conference & New Foundation Fellowship. In late January 2004, I went to a gathering on "Quaker Faith and Practice: The Witness of Our Lives and... March 15, 2004 8:09 PM. View Comments
- Sodium Free Friends. Yet another group of Friends (doesn't matter which, it could be any) is planning a program on "community." They quote... March 5, 2004 2:28 PM. View Comments
- Evangelical Friend's Take on the Postmodern Church. I’ve long been curious about whether anyone in the Evangelical branch of Friends has been following the “emergent church” movement.... March 1, 2004 7:59 PM. View Comments
- The Passion of Uncomfortable Orthodoxies: Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ". Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of Christ is a challenge for many modern Quakers. Most of the rich metaphors of... February 24, 2004 10:06 AM. View Comments
- FGC on Quaker Religious Ed. One of the pieces I helped put online in my role of FGC webmaster is FGC Religious Education: Lessons for... February 12, 2004 7:23 PM. View Comments
- Testimonies for twentieth-first century: a Testimony Against "Community". I propose a little amendment to the modern Quaker testimonies. I think it's time for a moratorium of the word... February 1, 2004 7:25 PM. View Comments
- Passing the Faith, Planet of the Quakers Style. There's that famous scene in the 1968 movie "Planet of the Apes" when our astronaut protagonist Charlton Heston realizes that... January 21, 2004 8:35 AM. View Comments
- Swinging off the gallows and into the Glory. Oh my gosh, TheOoze has an amazing article on called "Orthodox Twenty-Somethings" (a review of "The New Faithful" and "The... January 5, 2004 6:15 PM. View Comments
- Beyond the MacGuffins: Sheeran's Beyond Majority Rule. A review of Michael Sheeran's "Beyond Majority Rule". Twenty years later, do Friends need to experience the gathered condition?Beyond Majority... December 26, 2003 1:46 PM. View Comments
- Signs of Hope. I think I sometimes appear more pessimistic than I really am. Here are some of this week’s reasons for hope.... November 26, 2003 3:01 PM. View Comments
- We're All Ranters Now: On Liberal Friends and Becoming a Society of Finders. It's time to explain why I call this site "The Quaker Ranter" and to talk about my home, the liberal... November 18, 2003 4:34 PM. View Comments
- Are Catholics More Quaker?. I guess folks might wonder why the son of the Quaker Ranter is getting baptized in a Roman Catholic church…... November 16, 2003 8:28 PM. View Comments
- What I Want For Christmas. From Canadian Mennonites comes “BuyNothingChristmas.org”:http://www.buynothingchristmas.org/... November 9, 2003 1:12 PM. View Comments
- Peace and Twenty-Somethings. Context and observations arising from my Nonviolence.org post, Where is the grassroots contemporary nonviolence movement? A comparison of 1970s peace... October 17, 2003 9:26 AM. View Comments
- Post-Liberals & Post-Evangelicals?. Observations on the first Philadelphia Indie Allies Meetup. "Just about each of us at the table were coming from different... October 15, 2003 8:55 AM. View Comments
- Jesus goes Lo-Fi. Last night Julie, Theo and I visited a Gen-X church: Am I too hung up on Quaker practice?... October 13, 2003 10:46 AM. View Comments
- The Lost Quaker Generation. The other day I had lunch with an old friend of mine, a thirty-something Quaker very involved in nation-wide pacifist... September 30, 2003 9:37 PM. View Comments
- Emergent Church Movement: The Younger Evangelicals and Quaker Renewal. A look at the generational shifts facing Friends. Reading now (Ninth Month 2003): "The Younger Evangelicals" by Robert E. Webber.... September 6, 2003 4:39 PM. View Comments
- Friends Media Project. ... July 28, 2003 4:46 PM. View Comments
- My Experiments with Plainness. See also: "Resources on Quaker Plainness" This was a post I sent to the "Pearl" email list, which consists of... August 20, 2002 8:00 PM. View Comments
- Resources on Quaker Plain Dress. This is a list of testimonies, guides, books and resources on the Christian testimony of plainness, historical and present. It... July 30, 2001 7:49 PM. View Comments
- Visioning the Future of Young Adult Friends (1997). An visioning essay I wrote in March of 1997, for Friends Institute, the Philadelphia - area young adult Friends group... March 21, 1997 6:10 PM. View Comments
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