Interviewing John Calvi

March 13, 2024

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.

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.

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:

Why they left the Quakers

February 1, 2024

Here’s a sober­ing fac­toid: one of the more Googled search terms bring­ing peo­ple to Friends Jour­nal is “Why I left the Quakers.”

They find two things. The first match is a 22-year-old arti­cle from Jack Pow­el­son, “Why I am Leav­ing Quak­ers.” He notes the polit­i­cal diver­si­ty of the Quak­ers he joined in the 1940s and bemoans that “over the years, unpro­grammed Quak­ers have nar­rowed their views”:

Back in 1943, as many Repub­li­cans sat in the bench­es as Democ­rats, and meet­ing was a place for the spir­i­tu­al enrich­ment of per­sons of all polit­i­cal beliefs; even sol­diers in uni­form came to meet­ing. If the spir­it of the 1940s exist­ed now, right-to-lifers might today sit next to pro-choicers, each being equal­ly blessed in the eyes of God. With the spir­i­tu­al under-girding of the meet­ing, dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal beliefs would be advo­cat­ed in sec­u­lar organizations.

I think it worth­while to note that when Jack wrote his own obit­u­ary(!), he still iden­ti­fied as a Friend. This is not atyp­i­cal. I can quick­ly think of a half-dozen peo­ple who have pub­licly left Quak­ers but are still active in Quak­er social media spaces. I’m real­ly grate­ful for that, as many of them are per­son­al friends, men­tors, and inspi­ra­tions and I appre­ci­ate their per­spec­tive on the Quak­er dra­mas of the day. Quak­er spir­i­tu­al prin­ci­ples aren’t real­ly that unique and it’s quite pos­si­ble to fol­low them out­side of Quak­er reli­gious bod­ies and these nom­i­nal­ly ex-Quakers show how this can be done.

The sec­ond FJ arti­cle that those search­ing for “why I left Quak­ers” turn up is Bet­sy Blake’s 2013 “Quak­erism Left Me.” I’m a big Bet­sy Blake fan and worked on her as edi­tor on this arti­cle. I know it was brave to write and that she got some seri­ous push­back after pub­li­ca­tion. She too was talk­ing of polarization:

We knew we would be affect­ed by a divi­sive­ness that we did not expe­ri­ence and found con­trary to the for­give­ness and peace­mak­ing that we were being taught. Though younger, we did sym­pa­thize. We too had dealt with con­flicts, fights, bul­ly­ing, and pop­u­lar­i­ty con­tests. We knew enough to know that there was pas­sion and gen­uine care among the adults, mixed in with some­thing that was telling them to cut off their broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ.

Bet­sy of course was­n’t declar­ing that she her­self was leav­ing. The polar­iza­tions she spoke of soon led to schisms in both the Indi­ana year­ly meet­ing of her youth and the North Car­oli­na (FUM) of her teen years. I don’t know Bet­sy’s for­mal mem­ber­ship sta­tus nowa­days but she’s active on Quak­er social media. (Pro­fes­sion­al­ly, she designs web­sites nowa­days and offers a tem­plate for Quak­er meet­ings that looks great. I would total­ly rec­om­mend her if you’re look­ing to revamp your site!)


Anoth­er data point in all this might be George Amoss Jr.’s recent blog post, “Leav­ing Lib­er­al Quak­erism: What Love Would Have Me Do.”

George talks about by the “exac­er­bat­ed” “self-righteousness” he’s encountered:

The prox­i­mate cause of that alien­ation is the adop­tion among Lib­er­al Friends of sociopo­lit­i­cal ide­olo­gies that I find reduc­tive, dis­hon­est, divi­sive, and destruc­tive, lead­ing even to the defense of vio­lent crime. But that, at least in its cur­rent extreme form, is a recent devel­op­ment, facil­i­tat­ed by the fun­da­men­tal unsound­ness of con­tem­po­rary beliefs.

Friends are a big, messy group of peo­ple with all sorts of opin­ions. While we can agree on broad prin­ci­ples (racism bad, peace good), it’s rare to devel­op a real sense of uni­ty on either analy­sis or strat­e­gy. We should of course thresh out issues; inter­est sub-groups of like-minded indi­vid­u­als can build momen­tum and do a lot of good with­in both our reli­gious soci­ety and in the greater world. If we can tol­er­ate this messy diver­si­ty in our meet­ings, then our shared com­mu­ni­ty can be great incu­ba­tors for some­thing more rad­i­cal than itself. With time and spir­i­tu­al dis­cern­ment the rad­i­cal posi­tion can become main­stream among Friends. 

I do see some Friends nowa­days try­ing to press for more ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty than actu­al­ly exists. The ever-interesting and chal­leng­ing Adria Gulizia has a long com­ment on George’s Amos post about try­ing to rec­on­cile Quak­er beliefs with an antiracism state­ment being con­sid­ered by New York Year­ly Meet­ing. She con­cludes: “But what some of us have learned is that, while the stakes could not be high­er, it is not in vic­to­ry but in the strug­gle itself that we find our bless­ing, that in fac­ing our reck­on­ing with faith and courage, we may be strength­ened and deep­ened and trans­formed, not just as indi­vid­u­als but as a peo­ple of faith.” 

I hope we can con­tin­ue to respect the diver­si­ty and messi­ness of Lib­er­al Friends.

As I see it, the pur­pose of Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty is the spir­i­tu­al and com­mu­ni­ty part of our work. Our spe­cif­ic polit­i­cal lan­guages and analy­ses will evolve and change every decade or so; what I hope will remain con­stant is our desire for truth, our reliance on the Holy Spir­it for guid­ance, and our gen­uine love of neigh­bors in all their con­tra­dic­tions and messi­ness. In 2006 Paul Buck­ley wrote The Temp­ta­tion to Do Some­thing: A Qui­etist Per­spec­tive, that I think speaks to some of this.

I do hope George Amoss finds a way to stay engaged with Friends.