1950s Posts

Over on One Quaker Take, Timothy is surprised to read a definition of "Convergent Friend" that sounds a lot like a certain flavor of West Coast liberal Quakerism. It doesn't seem so surprising for me as it comes from Gregg Koskela, a pastor at an Evangelical Friends church. It was five years ago this month that I went to a loud pizza shop in Philadelphia to attend a  "Meet-Up" of readers of emerging church blogs and realized I had more common ground with these younger Evangelicals than I would have ever thought:

Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it's safe to say we are all "post" something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren't working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There's something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Perhaps it's finding a way to be less dogmatic at the same time that we're more disciplined. For Friends, that means questioning the contemporary cultural orthodoxy of liberal-think (getting beyond the cliched catch phrases borrowed from liberal Protestantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pecularily Quaker.

Rich the Brooklyn Quaker was recently asking about early Friends views of atonement and heaven and hell and it's a great post, but so is Marshall Massey's comment about how later Friends altered the message in distinctly different ways. The different flavors of Friends have spent a lot of energy minimizing certain parts of the Quaker message and over-emphasizing others and maybe the truth lies in some of the nuances we long ago paved over.

I have a working theory that a movement of "Convergence" will feel suspiciously liberal in evangelical circles, suspiciously evangelical in liberal circles, and suspiciously worldly in Quaker conservative circles. But that's almost to be expected. The work to be done is different depending on where we're starting from.

I don't think Friends are alone in these kinds of matters. I see this phenomenon in other religious denominations--the post-Evangelicals I broke pizza with back in 2003 weren't Quakers. But Friends might have a better way out of the existential puzzles that arise. For we (generally) believe that our action should be motivated first and foremost by the direct instruction of the risen Christ working on us now. That means we can't rely on canned answers. What worked in the past might not work now. The faith is the same. But what needs to be done and what needs to be preached is very much a here-and-now kind of proposition.

I can't help but think of Howard Brinton. Back in the 1950s his generation managed a reunification of East Coast Quaker factions that had been warring for over a century. One way they did it was hanging out together and then redefining what it meant to be a Friend. In Friends for 300 Years, Brinton argued that tests for membership shouldn't look at one's beliefs or practices. It was a truce and I'm sure it made sense at the time: there was a fairly strong consensus on what Quakerism meant and the fights at the edges over details were distracting. Fifty years later, there's little consensus among Philadelphia Friends and even those in leadership positions are loathe to talk about faith or practice except in a kind of code. I can't think of a single Philadelphia Friend who publicly expresses Quaker belief with the clarity or passion of mid-century figures like Brinton, Thomas Kelly or Rufus Jones.

What worked in the past might not work now. What sounds like old hat to to us might be very liberating for others. Convergence isn't very new. It's just keeping ourselves from ossifying into our own human concepts and staying open to the direct Christ. It's finding a way to maintain that crazy balance between tradition and the inward light. Same as it ever was.

Part of the playbook for American torture in Iraq and Guantánamo comes from Chinese interrogation methods used against captured Americans during the Cold War.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we're all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it's yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn't anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? "Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." And yet... it's clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever "confessions" can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it's also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It's hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it's could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

• The Friendly Funnel · Clearness
  I am, quite simply, being called to speak. I am being called to break the silence that smothers my Meeting with regards to non-heterosexual people, loves, sexuality, and even faith. I am being called to stand up and challenge heterosexism.
  (tags: comment)
• Rock & Roll Jr High Quakers (via QuakerQuaker.org)
  Evangelical Friends at California youth camp worship service rock to a praise song.
  (tags: quaker.video quaker.evangelical quaker.youth quaker)
• Ecstatic Scott on Quaking and Evangelicals
  Evangelical Friends have a heritage particularly rich with the Power and its workings because it wasn't only the early Quakers that quaked. For man the "born again" experience was often accompanied by manifestations of the Power.
  (tags: quaker quaker.evangelical quaker.liberal)
• Video: Philadelphia Quaker on life in interracial community in US South in 1950s
  Sue Angry lived in a pioneering interracial community in Georgia until gunfire and racist threats forced her to come north for shelter and support. (Follow link to related article).
  (tags: quaker.videos quaker.witness quaker.diversity quaker)

For those who love real-live conspiracies, there's the case of this week's three cut undersea cables.

On Wednesday the anchor of a ship off of Alexandria, Egypt, sliced through two important fiber optic internet cables that serve critical traffic between Western Europe and the Middle East and India. On Friday, a cable off Dubai was cut for still undetermined reasons, one proffered explanation being (yes) an errant anchor. One commentator called it "a national disaster," citing the almost complete loss of communication in Egypt; about 20-30% of Indian's traffic is affected. Here's a cool map of the undersea world from the Guardian.

Apparently some aren't calling these closely-time cuts such a coinkydink. The USS Jimmy Carter nuclear submarine (named after a US Navy submarine officer who later went into politics) is a spy sub specially designed with a kind of underwater "shuttle craft" perfect for installing taps. Can we add large-scale internet failure to the cost of war?

When I was about seven I wrote a school report on the Glomar Explorer, a hugely-expensive deep-sea drilling ship built by eccentric gazillionaire Howard Hughes to extract minerals from the ocean floor. Well, at least that was the cover story. Shortly after my report, the Los Angeles Times uncovered the real story: the Glomar Explorer was a CIA ship built to recover a sunken Soviet sub off of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean (I myself didn't learn about this until only a few years ago).

Then of course there's the true stories of the secret White House, secret Pentagon and secret Congress, three separate underground mini-cities carved inside Appalachian ridges in the 1950s to be used in case of Ruskie attack. The locations are well known now. Interesting Fact #1: if you study maps you'll see underused interstate highways leading from Washington to the secret White House and secret Pentagon, ready for quick escape. Interesting Fact #2: the secret Congress is much further away, has no mysteriously-placed highway and was unknown to most if not all members of Congress; whoops!, no legislative branch! I can't find the websites listing all this very quickly but they're there and it's all pretty much out in the open now. When looking I found Interesting Fact #3: the White House East Wing was built in WWII to hide construction of a underground bunker, the famous "War Room" fictionalized in Doctor Strangelove. Veeery interestink, mein fuhrer, I mean mein President.

For those thinking I'm just busting on the U.S., rest assured. I have one client in a Far East Asian country I won't name who can't access this website, my design site, her internet bank, or any Blogspot-hosted site because the country's leaders have put a firewall around the whole frigging country, blocking off sites they don't like!

MONDAY UPDATE: From Egypt's Ministry of Communication: "A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time." (via Jesse Robbins @ O'Reilly)

• Billboard: Gandhi quote from Friends in Delaware USA
  An anonymous donor paid for this billboard in Laurel, Delaware, for a full year starting last July. It's visible from southbound Route 13 on the left side of the highway. The Southern Quarter website has a supporting peace page.
  (tags: quaker.signs quaker)
• Johan M: what do church signboards tell the visitor?
  At some point, the meetinghouse sign came up. Several of us confessed our dissatisfaction at what it says. I said that what I really want on our sign is simply this: "We gather here every Sunday at 10:30 to meet with God. Please join us."
  (tags: quaker.signs)
• Ironic & iconic outreach posters from Olympic View Friends Church, Washington USA
  Pop culture mashups, many re-purposing images from the 1950s.
  (tags: quaker quaker.signs)
• 2006 Quaker billboard along Philadelphia highway
  "Peace is Possible," it says. [The location] is probably known best by those who listen to the traffic reports as a place where traffic often backs up. So for two weeks, people stuck in traffic get to meditate on the metaphysics of peace.
  (tags: quaker.signs)
• Chuck Fager's compares meetinghouse signs
  "Quakers?? I thought they all died out." Such confusion is embarrassing, but all too understandable, in view of the fact that so many meetings are all but invisible, even in their own communities. How bad does it get?
  (tags: quaker.signs)
• NYTimes: Atlantic Monthly website gets an overhaul
  The Web site "functioned for too long as just a marketing arm for the print magazine, rather than publication in its own right," said the editor in chief. For years, he said, "it was a very small number of people, working very hard, who kept it alive."
  (tags: tech tech.internetculture)
• LizOpp on borrowing from other traditions what we have ourselves
  What does it say about the condition of our meetings and of our Religious Society when we ourselves don't know enough about our own tradition that we go reaching into another faith tradition...? And religion, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
  (tags: quaker quaker.influences)
• Friendly Funnel on seeking as end in itself
  Sometimes I feel that we Seekers are afraid of finding the Truth, because we wouldn't know what to do with it then. If we are not Seeking, then what are we doing? And this is, I think, a flaw of ours: that we have become connected to the idea of Seeking
  (tags: quaker quaker.alienation)
• Robin M on Quaker committees falling apart
  What if the previous clerk was rightly led to stop? Met with the new clerk, gave the new person all their materials, advice, and best wishes? In both cases, I thought the transition had gone pretty well. I was wrong.
  (tags: quaker quaker.process comment)
• Friendly Funnel: does Quakerism just have class limitations?
  The question of why more people weren't Quakers was raised. One weighty Friend had a simple answer: "Because Quakerism is a religion of Seekers, and most people prefer having answers instead of more questions."
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach)
• Friend Eden Grace interviewed by PRI radion on violence in Kenya
  The violence in Kenya today was especially fierce in the western town of Kisumu. Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with long-time Kisumu resident Eden Grace.
  (tags: quaker quaker.audio quaker.witness quaker.kenya)
• Ben L on Quaker Quest's arrival in staid Philadelphia
  Quaker Quest, with its commitment to 21st century P.R., well designed glossy posters and brochures is a way to draw new and "frightening" people to us. QQ is a direct affront to the Quietest pall which has been hanging, smog-like, over my Yearly Meeting.
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach quaker.liberal)
• Thin Place Dan with personal theories about Quaker Jargon and a beginning lexicon
  Soon after I began attending Quaker meetings, I became aware that Quakers have their own meanings for some words and phrases that are different from the meanings used by non-Quakers. That kind of jargon frequently appears in cultural or vocational groups.
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach)
• Imperfect Eileen on hearing one another
  After eight years of threshing sessions, discussions, meetings for worship for business, personal conversations, and called meetings for worship, I have the sense that we still have not totally heard each other. We can't just wait this out.
  (tags: quaker quaker.alienation quaker.process)

Fascinating details coming out about the new U.S intelligence estimate on Iran. It was released two days after a major meeting of world powers in Paris, a meeting where sanctions and Iran were discussed. So what's with the timing? Did Condoleeza just not get it back from Kinkos in time? If you're about to release a major report that will reshape half a decade of U.S.-Iranian relations, maybe you whip up a quick power point presentation for the weekend powwow in Paris?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is touting this as a victory for his country: "This is a declaration of victory for the Iranian nation against the world powers over the nuclear issue." I'm not sure it's exactly a victory but it is a confirmation of what he's been claiming for years: Iran is not building a bomb. The victory is in the Bush Administration implicit acknowledgment that it's not always right. Of course Bush is not the kind of guy who can really ever admit he's wrong and he's still throwing snipes out: Condi "told reporters in the Ethiopian capital Wednesday that the U.S. intelligence report's public release showed the Bush administration was committed to transparent democracy while Iran was not."

Now I actually agree that we can't downplay Iran. The country doesn't have the kind of openness and democracy that should be a basic human right. If it could get the bomb, I'm sure it would. What major regional power wouldn't want it? With all the internationally bullying going around it's not a bad thing to have in your back pocket.  President Bush declared a de facto Cold War against Iraq in his 2002 State of Union "Axis of Evil" speech.

But one thing about Iran is that it's Iraq twenty years later. If Iran's civic structure is broken, then the West is largely to blame. The British and Soviets invaded Iran in 1941 to secure oil supplies and it was they who put in power Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran. When Pahlavi lost power in the early 1950s, the U.S. Central Intelligence agency led a covert operation called Operation Ajax to put him back in power (the project was led by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Teddy's grandson). In 1969 the so-called Nixon Doctrine formalized the Shah's Iran as a key American ally. The Iranian Revolution changed all this and along with the brutal Iran-Iraq War created the Iran we know today.

It's easy to forget that we've long supported dictators who promised us a steady supply of oil. Saddam Hussein was our buddy until he threatened Kuwaiti oil fields. If the United States had spent the last thirty years working on building strong democracies in the Middle East then both Iraq and Iran would most likely be peaceful, strong nations without any great strong incentive to put in the massive investment needed to develop weapons of mass destruction. Might oil cost a few dollars more a barrel? Sure. But isn't that worth the thousands of American, Iraqi and Iranian lives that have been destroyed in twenty years of near-constant warfare? 

My friend Peter Blood is part of a group organizing a Young Friends North America camp in Barnesville, Ohio this June and he asked that I help get word out about it. The first few days are a reunion for not-so-young-anymore Friends (YFNA more or less wound down in the late 1990s). The second part is the camp, which hopes "to bring together Friends from all branches of Quakerism, to share what Spirit-led Quakerism is about at its core--and to experience it together." Check out the Camp's schedule for details on what this looks like.

The handy-dandy Friends Historical Dictionary says YFNA started in the mid-1950s. I've heard enough stories (and met some YFNA couples) to know it was a very important touchstone for a few generations of young Friends. I've been involved in a couple of failed YFNA resuscitation attempts over the last few years and can't tell you why none of them took. It could be economics (high gas prices and high college loans keeping most 20-somethings from being too free-range) or simple demographics (too few Gen X Friends). Perhaps other events like the FGC Gathering fulfilled the young Quaker hook-up function well enough.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad to see that reunion is tied into a free-form camp that doesn't seem to be trying to be a YFNA organizing meeting (at this point reviving YFNA has the same empty guffaw punch as the kids now nostalgically calling themselves the new SDS). It seems like there's more Quaker youth organizing going on, which is great, and I hope the camp helps that momentum.

Update: I've put up an YFNA Reunion/Camp page up over in the events section of QuakerQuaker to follow any of the blog chatter about the gathering.