apologies Posts

Apologies to Ralph DiGia, RIP, for the morbid link title. I met him a number of times in my associations with the War Resisters League (first through co-publishing books with New Society Publishers, then through a two year stint on the WRL National Committee). Ralph was an oasis in meetings packed to overflowing with outsized egos and self-important agendas. He was a warm guy, curious, always willing to lend a hand, a hard-working gem in the pacifist world.

• Derek @ Speaking truth: Burundian evangelical Quake jump boogie gospel (Video)
  DeRich Mullin's much loved '93 hit: "Our God Is An Awesome God" is also loved in Bujumbura, Burundi, central Africa.
  (tags: quaker quaker.videos quaker.africa)
• New DVD: Finding Our Voices
  Eight stories of civil dissent and resistance are woven together in 80 minutes of action to remind us that passionate individuals can take stands to persuade others to follow.
  (tags: nonviolence)
• Lifelong war resister Ralph DiGia, 1914-2008
  An associate of A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Dave Dellinger, Barbara Deming, and many others. While Ralph was not a public speaker or a writer, he played a key a role and was central to many of the major antiwar actions of the past six decades.
  (tags: nonviolence)
• New Blog: a quaker's flourishing faith
  I am currently working on a Ph.D. in which two of my passions intersect - Quaker history and Christian higher education. How do we navigate the postmodern matrix as Christians? How do we live as disciples of Christ today and into tomorrow?
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)
• LizOpp on mixed weddings and Qr peer pressure
  Recently I shared with a committee on which I serve that as a Quaker, I'm not called to be faithful to other Friends in the meeting: I am called to be faithful to how God leads me, and I seek support to help me in my faithfulness and obedience.
  (tags: quaker quaker.convergent)

Apologies to The Church Lady for the title (and apologies to Gregg K, I'm sure the actual sermon on hell from this Newburgh Friends Church pastor is more interesting than anything on Saturday night TV). The parenting links are a start toward a parenting page on QuakerQuaker. Those wanting to help should tag their Del.icio.us bookmarks and Flickr photos as "quaker.parenting"

• Susan Tannehill in Friends Journal: Parenting for Adulthood
  Our children, ages 12 and 8, are being raised within our meeting. Many times in my life as a Friendly parent I find myself not wanting to choose between two alternatives but to look at both of them and find some ground between them.
  (tags: quaker.parenting quaker.friendsjournal)
• Blog: Tree of Life Homeschool
  We're Quaker homeschoolers following the Enki approach to education and just beginning our journey. This is a personal scrapbook, a way for us to connect with other Quaker families and Enki homeschoolers.
  (tags: quaker.parenting)
• Gregg K preaches about hell!
  [M]y attempt to be faithful to obey the leadings of the Spirit for this particular group who are my spiritual community. I would guess that we may have ample opportunity to broaden the discussion. [Follow link in post for sermon]
  (tags: quaker quaker.christianity)
• Susanne K on the fruits of discernment
  What I have learned about discernment is to expect that if I am on the right path, on God's path for me, I will experience the "fruits of the spirit" - a sense of peace and "rightness" at a deeper level than personal emotions of joy, anger, or s
  (tags: quaker quaker.clearness)
• Imperfect Eileen on discernment in children
  I've been thinking about trusting the discernment of our children. It seems to bring together two huge and difficult questions: How do we know if someone else is truly listening to God's guidance? And how do we prepare our children to be adults?
  (tags: quaker quaker.clearness quaker.parenting)
• Chris M recounts sharing Quaker silence with at non-Quaker board retreat
  I helped facilitate a session on Quaker silence as one part of a board retreat for a local organization. We only had 15 minutes scheduled for the actual silence, and most of the group were not Quakers, so we called it "silent reflection/worship time."
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach)

Expect oddities in QuakerQuaker over the next few hours as I switch servers. Links are sure to be screwy and feeds sure to be broken. If we're lucky there won't be any bandwidth issues and the javascript goodies won't blow out everyone's browsers. My apologies in advance. If you see a problem that's not resolved please email me.

Update, 11:55am: so far mostly so good. The site's moved over. I think I've fixed up most of the links. Caching seems to be problematic still (if you get a bunch of gibberish instead of links, then hit refresh). New features include a brand spanking new design, a little fun with the Flickr flash slideshow and commenting on category pages using Disqus.com.

More importantly, it's very easy for me to set up new categories and event pages and I plan to be a lot more generous doling them out. Let me know about Quaker events where we might expect a conclave of bloggers and let me know those tagging categories you've always wanted. I've added quaker.racism, quaker.arts, and quaker.parenting, three popular requests, but I won't bump them up to the main sidebar until they get a certain amount of content.

And on the timely note, I added a category to collect news about the violence in Kenya. Those of you who feel comfortable using del.icio.us should tag Quaker Kenyan news you find with "quaker.kenya"

Received an email from my web host this weekend: apparently they've been trying to get payment from a less-than-full credit card these last few months and just realized that their charges weren't going through. Yikes. In the past I've used my Paypal donations credit card to pay the bill on the account that covers QuakerQuaker, QuakerRanter, etc., but when donations dried up this summer, I switched to my personal day-to-day card which fluctuates depending on the status of our kitchen cupboards (currently out of yogurt, low on crackers, milk might be gone).

The bill's up to $135.90 and the next month should be due soon. Do Friends want to chip in and help spot some of this? If I get enough I'll switch the bill back to the donations account altogether.

PS: for those following links, I've been ranting up a bit about money issues, Friends, and the state of our beat neighbors here in the U.S. of A. over in the comments at Classy Jeanne and Agitator Dave's recent posts (might be awaiting confirmation). Apologies to both for my long-windedness, there's obviously some intriguing issues sorting themselves together in my head and heart these days.

Just a quick note that I'll be upgrading this site over the next few days, part of a migration of all of my sites to the awesome new Movable Type 4.0. My apologies if commenting or search breaks during this process. Update: it seemed to have worked, now I'll have to break it by adding all sorts of experimental features!

www.flickr.com

Click on any of the pictures above for captions, etc. Here's the photoset of our whole trip. Apologies to all the Theo fans (you know who you are) for not getting these up sooner.

In the bookstore today a customer called in and asked about "Let your lives speak," a phrase frequently attributed to George Fox (it's the source of a book title, "Lives that Speak"). While a quick Google search finds lots of pages where people say things like "as George Fox said, you should 'let your lives speak,'" no one actually gives details of when and where he said it. The phrase seems to sit only by itself, with no passages before or after it. A few sites claim it was part of his message on Firbank Fell but no one cites a source. Sitting on the same Palm Pilot as the Yardbirds MP3s is Fox's Journal (Jones edition) and a keyword search doesn't pick up "lives that speak" or "let your lives speak" anywhere. Smells fishy, like another one of those too-good-to-be-true Fox quotes. Can anyone document that it's real?

PS: I fly bright and early tomorrow morning for this year's Quakers Uniting in Publications meeting, in Oregon. I don't know what internet access I'll have so my apologies if new comments have to sit for a few days.