Tag Archives: Bill Samuel

Sep 28

Talking like a Quaker: does anyone really care about schism anymore?

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Over on my design blog I’ve just posted an arti­cle, Bank­ing on rep­u­ta­tions, which looks at how the web­sites for high-profile cul­tural insti­tu­tions are often built with­out regard to nat­ural web publicity–there’s no focus on net cul­ture or search engine vis­i­bil­ity. The sites do get vis­ited, but only because of the rep­u­ta­tion of the insti­tu­tion itself. My guess is that peo­ple go to them for very spe­cific func­tions (look­ing up a phone num­ber, order­ing tick­ets, etc.). I fin­ish by ask­ing the ques­tion, “Are the audi­ences of high brow insti­tu­tions so full of hip young audi­ences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?”

I won’t bela­bor the point, but I won­der if some­thing sim­i­lar is hap­pen­ing within Friends. It’s kind of weird that only two peo­ple have com­mented on Johan Maurer’s blog post about Bal­ti­more Yearly Meeting’s report on Friends United Meet­ing. Johan’s post may well be the only place where online dis­cus­sion about this par­tic­u­lar report is avail­able. I gave a plug for it and it was the most pop­u­lar link from Quak­erQuaker, so I know peo­ple are see­ing it. The larger issue is dealt with else­where (Bill Samuel has a par­tic­u­larly use­ful resource page) but Johan’s piece seems to be get­ting a big yawn.

It’s been super­seded as the most pop­u­lar Quak­erQuaker link by a light­hearted call for an Inter­na­tional Talk Like a Quaker Day put up by a Live­jour­nal blog­ger. It’s fun but it’s about as seri­ous as you might expect. It’s get­ting picked up on a num­ber of blogs, has more links than Johan’s piece and at cur­rent count has thir­teen com­menters. I think it’s a great way to poke a lit­tle fun of our­selves and think about out­reach and I’m happy to link to it but I have to think there’s a les­son in its pop­u­lar­ity vis-a-vis Johan’s post.

Here’s the inevitable ques­tion: do most Quak­ers just not care about Friends United Meet­ing or Bal­ti­more Yearly Meet­ing, about a mod­ern day cul­ture clash that is but a few degrees from boil­ing over into full-scale insti­tu­tional schism? For all my bravado I’m as much an insti­tu­tional Quaker as any­one else. I care about our denom­i­na­tional pol­i­tics but do oth­ers, and do they really?

Yearly meet­ing ses­sions and more entertainment-focused Quaker gath­er­ings are lucky if they get three to five per­cent atten­dance. The gov­ern­ing body of my yearly meet­ing is made up of about one per­cent of its mem­ber­ship; add a per­cent or two or three and you have how many peo­ple actu­ally pay any kind of atten­tion to it or to yearly meet­ing pol­i­tics. A few years ago a Quaker pub­lisher com­mis­sioned a promi­nent Friend to write an update to lib­eral Friends’ most widely read intro­duc­tory book and she man­gled the whole thing (down to a totally made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after publication–even insid­ers don’t care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most con­tem­po­rary Friends post-institutional? The per­cent­age of Friends involved in the work of our reli­gious bod­ies has per­haps always been small, but the divide seems more strik­ing now that the inter­net is pro­vid­ing com­pe­ti­tion. The big Quaker insti­tu­tions skate on being rec­og­nized as offi­cial bod­ies but if their par­tic­i­pa­tion rate is low, their recog­ni­tion fac­tor small, and their abil­ity to influ­ence the Quaker cul­ture there­fore min­i­mal, then are they really so impor­tant? After six years of mar­riage I can hear my wife’s ques­tion as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the reli­gious author­ity of these bod­ies come from? As some­one who sees the world through a sociological/historical per­spec­tive, my ques­tion is com­ple­men­tary but some­what dif­fer­ent: if so few peo­ple care, then is there author­ity? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when
a schism might mean the loss of con­trol over a beloved school or campground–factor out
the sen­ti­men­tal fac­tor and what’s left?

I don’t think a dimin­ish­ing influ­ence is a pos­i­tive trend, but it won’t go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in com­mit­tees). How are today’s gen­er­a­tion of Friends going to deal with chang­ing cul­tural forces that are threat­en­ing to under­mine our cur­rent prac­tices? And how might we use the new oppor­tu­ni­ties to advance the Quaker mes­sage and Christ’s agenda?

Jan 01

The Quaker Peace Testimony: Living in the Power, Reclaiming the Source

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The Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony is one of the pop­u­larly well-known out­ward expres­sions of Quaker faith. But have we for­got­ten its source?

In a meet­ing for wor­ship I attended a few years ago a woman rose and spoke about her work for peace. She told us of let­ters writ­ten and meet­ings attended; she cer­tainly kept busy. She con­fessed that it is tir­ing work and she cer­tainly sounded tired and put-upon. But she said she’d keep at it and she quoted early Friends’ man­date to us: that we must work to take away the occa­sion of war.

Read con­tem­po­rary Friends lit­er­a­ture and you’ll see this imper­a­tive all over the place. From one brochure: “We are called as Friends to lead lives that ‘take away the occa­sion of all wars.’ ” Yet this state­ment, like many con­tem­po­rary state­ments on Quaker tes­ti­monies, is taken out of con­text. The actor has been switched and the mes­sage has been lost. For the peace tes­ti­mony doesn’t instruct us to take away occasions.

The Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony: Liv­ing in the Power

The clas­sic state­ment of the Quaker peace tes­ti­mony is the 1660 Dec­la­ra­tion. Eng­land was embroiled in war and insur­rec­tion. A failed polit­i­cal coup was blamed on Quak­ers and it looked like Friends were going to be per­se­cuted once more by the civil author­i­ties. But Friends weren’t inter­ested in the polit­i­cal process swirling around them. They weren’t tak­ing sides in the coups. “I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occa­sion of all wars,” George Fox had told civil author­i­ties ten years before and the sign­ers of the dec­la­ra­tion elab­o­rated why they could not fight: “we do earnestly desire and wait, that by the Word of God’s power and its effec­tual oper­a­tion in the hearts of men, the king­doms of this world may become the king­doms of the Lord.”

For all of the over-intellectualism within Quak­erism today, it’s a sur­prise that these state­ments are so rarely parsed down. Look at Fox’s state­ment: many mod­ern activists could agree we should take away occas­sion for war, cer­tainly, but it’s a sub­or­di­nate clause. It is not refer­ring to the “we,” but instead mod­i­fies “power.” Our instruc­tions are to live in that power. It is that power that does the work of tak­ing away war’s occasion.

I’m not quib­bling but get­ting to the very heart of the clas­sic under­stand­ing of peace. It is a “tes­ti­mony,” in that we are “tes­ti­fy­ing” to a larger truth. We are acknowl­edg­ing some­thing: that there is a Power (let’s start cap­i­tal­iz­ing it) that takes away the need for war. It is that Power that has made peace pos­si­ble and that Power that has already acted and con­tin­ues to act in our world. The job has actu­ally been done. The occa­sion for war has been ended. Our rela­tion­ship to this Power is sim­ply to live in it. Around the time of the Dec­la­ra­tion, George Fox wrote a let­ter to Lord Pro­tec­tor Oliver Cromwell :

The next morn­ing I was moved of the Lord to write a paper to the Pro­tec­tor, Oliver Cromwell; wherein I did, in the pres­ence of the Lord God, declare that I denied the wear­ing or draw­ing of a car­nal sword, or any other out­ward weapon, against him or any man; and that I was sent of God to stand a wit­ness against all vio­lence, and against the works of dark­ness; and to turn peo­ple from dark­ness to light; and to bring them from the causes of war and fight­ing, to the peace­able gospel.

The peace tes­ti­mony is actu­ally a state­ment of faith. Not sur­pris­ing really, or it shouldn’t be. Early Friends were all about shout­ing out the truth. “Christ has come to teach the peo­ple him­self” was a early tagline. It’s no won­der that they stretched it out to say that Christ has taken away occa­sion for war. Hal­lelu­jiah!, I can hear them shout. Let the cel­e­bra­tion begin. I always hear John Lennon echo­ing these cel­e­brants when he sings “War is over” and fol­lows with “if we want it.”

Obvi­ously war isn’t over. Peo­ple must still want it. And they do. War is rooted in lusts, James 4:1–3 tells us. Mod­ern Amer­i­can greed for mate­r­ial things with ever more rapac­ity and blind­ness. We drive our S.U.V.s and then fight for oil sup­plies in the Per­sian Gulf. We worry that we won’t be pop­u­lar or loved if we don’t use teeth-whitening strips or don’t obsess over the lat­est T.V. fad. We aren’t liv­ing in the Power and the Deceiver con­vinces us that war is peace.

But the Power is there. We can live in that Power and it will take away more than occa­sions for war, for it will take away the lusts and inse­cu­ri­ties that lead to war.

Speak­ing Faith to Power

When you’ve acknowl­edge the Power, what does faith become? It becomes a tes­ti­mony to the world. I can tes­tify to you per­son­ally that there is a Power and that this Power will com­fort you, teach you, guide you. Early Friends were pros­e­lytis­ing when they wrote their state­ment. After writ­ing his let­ter to Cromwell, Fox went to visit the man him­self. Cromwell was undoubt­edly the most pow­er­ful man in Eng­land and any­thing but a paci­fist. He had raised and led armies against the king and it was he who ordered the behead­ing of King Charles I. And what did Fox talk about? Truth. And Jesus.

George Fox stood as a wit­ness just as he promised, and tried to turn Cromwell from dark­ness to light, to bring him from the cause of war to the peace­able gospel. By Fox’s account, it almost worked:

As I was turn­ing, he caught me by the hand, and with tears in his eyes said, “Come again to my house; for if thou and I were but an hour of a day together, we should be nearer one to the other”; adding that he wished me no more ill than he did to his own soul. I told him if he did he wronged his own soul; and admon­ished him to hear­ken to God’s voice, that he might stand in his coun­sel, and obey it; and if he did so, that would keep him from hard­ness of heart; but if he did not hear God’s voice, his heart would be hard­ened. He said it was true.

This then is the Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony. I don’t think it can be divorced from its spir­i­tual basis. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, many lead­ing Friends tried to dilute the Quaker mes­sage to make it more under­stand­able and palat­able for non-Friends. A line of George Fox was taken out of con­text and used so much that most Friends have adopted “that of God in every­one” as a uni­fied creed, for­get­ting that it’s a mod­ern phrase whose ambi­gu­ity Fox wouldn’t have appre­ci­ated. When we talk about peace, we often do so in very sec­u­lar­ized lan­guage. We’re still try­ing to pros­e­ly­tize, but our mes­sage is a ratio­nal­ist one that war can be solved by tech­no­cratic means and a more demo­c­ra­tic appor­tion­ment of resources. Most con­tem­po­rary state­ments have all the umph of a floor speech at the Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion, with only throw-away ref­er­ences to “com­mu­ni­ties of faith,” and bland state­ments of “that of God” hint­ing that there might be some­thing more to our message.

The free­dom of liv­ing the Power

We actu­ally share much of the peace tes­ti­mony with a num­ber of Chris­tians. There are many Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians who read­ily agree that there’s a Power but con­clude that their job is just to wait for its return. They define the power strictly as Jesus Christ and the return as the Sec­ond Com­ing. They fore­see a worldly Armaged­don when peace will fail and thou­sands will die.

That’s not our way. Friends pulled Chris­tian­ity out of the first cen­tury and refused to wait for any last cen­tury to declare that Jesus is here now, “to teach his peo­ple him­self.” We keep con­stant vigil and rejoice to find the returned Christ already here, deep in our hearts, at work in the world. Our way of work­ing for peace is to praise the Power, wait for its guid­ance and then fol­low it’s com­mands through what­ever hard­ship await us. When we’re doing it right, we become instru­ments of God in the ser­vice of the Spirit. Christ does use us to take away the occa­sions for war!

But the wait­ing is nec­es­sary, the guid­ance is key. It gives us the strength to over­come over­work and burn-out and it gives us the direc­tion for our work. The slick­est, most expen­sive peace cam­paigns and the most dra­matic self-inflating actions often achieve much less than the sim­ple, hum­ble, behind-the-scenes, year-in, year-out ser­vice. I sus­pect that the ways we’re most used by the Spirit are ways we barely perceive.

Quaker min­istry is not a pas­sive wait­ing. We pray, we test, we work hard and we use all the gifts our Cre­ator has given us (intel­li­gence, tech­nolo­gies, etc.). There are prob­lems in the world, huge ones that need address­ing and we will address them. But we do so out of a joy. And through our work, we ask oth­ers to join us in our joy, to lift up the cross with us, join­ing Jesus metaphor­i­cally in wit­ness­ing to the world.

The modern-day Pres­i­dent order­ing a war suf­fers from the same lack of faith that George Fox’s Cromwell did. They are igno­rant or impa­tient of Christ’s mes­sage and so take peace-making into their own hands. But how much do faith­less politi­cians dif­fer from many con­tem­po­rary peace activists? When I block­ade a fed­eral build­ing or stand in front of a tank, am I try­ing to stop war myself? When I say it’s my job to “end the occa­sion for war,” am I tak­ing on the work of God? I feel sad for the woman who rose in Meet­ing for Wor­ship and told us how hard her peace work is. Each of us alone is inca­pable of bring­ing on world peace, and we turn in our own tracks with a quiet dis­pair. I’ve seen so many Quaker peace activists do really poor jobs with such a over­whelmed sense of sad­ness that they don’t get much sup­port. Detached from the Spirit, we look to gain our self-worth from oth­ers and we start doing things sim­ply to impress our worldly peers. If we’re lucky we get money but not love, respect but not a new voice lifted up in the choir of praise for the Cre­ator. We’ve given up hope in God’s promise and despair is our ever-present companion.

Our tes­ti­mony to the world

It doesn’t need to be this way. And I think for many Friends it hasn’t been. When you work for the Power, you don’t get attached to your work’s out­come in the same way. We’re just foot­sol­diers for the Lord. Often we’ll do things and have no idea how they’ve affected oth­ers. It’s not our job to know, for it’s not our job to be sucess­ful as defined by the world. Maybe all the work I’ve ever done for peace is for some exchange of ideas that I won’t rec­og­nize at the time. We need to strive to be gra­cious and grounded even in the midst of all the undra­matic moments (as well as those most dra­matic moments). We will be known to the world by how we wit­ness our trust in God and by how faith­fully we live our lives in obe­di­ence to the Spirit’s instructions.

Related Read­ing

Again, the link to the 1660 Dec­la­ra­tion is the first stop for those want­ing to under­stand Friends’ under­stand­ing on peacemaking.

Quaker His­to­rian Jerry Frost talked about the peace tes­ti­mony as part of his his­tory of twen­ti­eth cen­tury Quak­erism (“Non-violence seemed almost a panacea for lib­eral Friends seek­ing polit­i­cally and socially rel­e­vant peace work”). Bill Samuel has writ­ten a his­tory of the peace tes­ti­mony with a good list of links. Lloyd Lee Wil­son wrote about being a “Chris­t­ian Paci­fist” in the April 2003 edi­tion of Quaker Life.

If wars are indeed rooted in lust, then non­vi­o­lent activism should be involved in exam­i­nat­ing those lusts. In The Roots of Non­vi­o­lence (writ­ten for Non​vi​o​lence​.org), I talk a lit­tle about how activists might relate to the deeper causes of the war to tran­scend the “anti-war” move­ment. One way I’ve been explor­ing anti-consumerism in with my re-examination of the Quaker tra­di­tion of plain dress.

For rea­sons I can’t under­stand, peo­ple some­times read “Liv­ing in the Power: the Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony Reclaimed” and think I’m “advo­cat­ing a retreat from directly engag­ing the prob­lems of the world” (as one Friend put it). I ask those who think I’m posit­ing some sort of either/or dual­ity betwen faith vs. works, or min­istry vs. activism, to please reread the essay. I have been a peace activist for over fif­teen years and run non​vi​o​lence​.org [update: ran, I laid it down in 2008), a promi­nent web­site on non­vi­o­lence. I think some of the mis­un­der­stand­ings are generational.

Nov 18

We’re All Ranters Now: On Liberal Friends and Becoming a Society of Finders

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It’s time to explain why I call this site “The Quaker Ranter” and to talk about my home, the lib­eral branch of Quak­ers. Non-Quakers can be for­given for think­ing that I mean this to be a place where I, Mar­tin Kel­ley, “rant,” i.e., where I “utter or express with extrav­a­gance.” That may be the result (smile), but it’s not what I mean and it’s not the real pur­pose behind this site.

Friends and Ranters

The Ranters were fellow-travelers to the Friends in the reli­gious tur­moil of seventeenth-century Eng­land. The coun­try­side was cov­ered with preach­ers and lay peo­ple run­ning around Eng­land seek­ing to revive prim­i­tive Chris­tian­ity. George Fox was one, declar­ing that “Christ has come to teach his peo­ple him­self” and that hireling clergy were dis­tort­ing God’s mes­sage. The move­ment that coa­lesced around him as “The Friends of Truth” or “The Quak­ers” would take its orders directly from the Spirit of Christ.

This worked fine for a few years. But before long a lead­ing Quaker rode into the town of Bris­tol in imi­ta­tion of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Not a good idea. The author­i­ties con­victed him of heresy and George Fox dis­tanced him­self from his old friend. Soon after­wards, a quasi-Quaker col­lec­tion of reli­gious rad­i­cals plot­ted an over­throw of the gov­ern­ment. That also didn’t go down very well with the author­i­ties, and Fox quickly dis­avowed vio­lence in a state­ment that became the basis of our peace tes­ti­mony. Clearly the Friends of the Truth needed to fig­ure out mech­a­nisms for decid­ing what mes­sages were truly of God and who could speak for the Friends movement.

The cen­tral ques­tion was one of author­ity. Those Friends rec­og­nized as hav­ing the gift for spir­i­tual dis­cern­ment were put in charge of a sys­tem of dis­ci­pline over way­ward Friends. Friends devised a method for deter­min­ing the valid­ity of indi­vid­ual lead­ings and con­cerns. This sys­tem rested on an assump­tion that Truth is immutable, and that any errors come from our own will­ful­ness in dis­obey­ing the mes­sage. New lead­ings were first weighed against the tra­di­tion of Friends and their pre­de­ces­sors the Israelites (as brought down to us through the Bible).

Ranters often looked and sounded like Quak­ers but were opposed to any impo­si­tion of group author­ity. They were a move­ment of indi­vid­ual spir­i­tual seek­ers. Ranters thought that God spoke directly to indi­vid­u­als and they put no lim­its on what the Spirit might instruct us. Tra­di­tion had no role, insti­tu­tions were for disbelievers.

Mean­while Quak­ers set up Quar­terly and Yearly Meet­ings to insti­tu­tion­al­ize the sys­tem of elders and dis­ci­pline. This worked for awhile, but it shouldn’t be too sur­pris­ing that this human insti­tu­tion even­tu­ally broke down. World­li­ness and wealth sep­a­rated the elders from their less well-to-do brethren and new spir­i­tual move­ments swept through Quaker ranks. Divi­sions arose over the eter­nal ques­tion of how to pass along a spir­i­tu­al­ity of con­vince­ment in a Soci­ety grown com­fort­able. By the early 1800s, Philadel­phia elders had became a kind of aris­toc­racy based on birthright and in 1827 they dis­owned two-thirds of their own yearly meet­ing. The dis­owned major­ity nat­u­rally devel­oped a dis­trust of author­ity, while the aris­to­cratic minor­ity even­tu­ally real­ized there was no one left to elder.

Over the next cen­tury and a half, suc­ces­sive waves of pop­u­lar reli­gious move­ments washed over Friends. Revival­ism, Deism, Spir­i­tu­al­ism and Pro­gres­sive Uni­tar­i­an­ism all left their mark on Friends in the Nine­teenth Cen­tury. Mod­ern lib­eral Protes­tantism, Evan­gel­i­cal­ism, New Ageism, and sixties-style rad­i­cal­ism trans­formed the Twen­ti­eth. Each fad lifted up a piece of Quak­ers’ orig­i­nal mes­sage but invari­ably added its own incon­gru­ous ele­ments into wor­ship. The Soci­ety grew ever more fractured.

Faced with ever-greater the­o­log­i­cal dis­unity, Friends sim­ply gave up. In the 1950s, the two Philadel­phia Yearly Meet­ings reunited. It was cel­e­brated as rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. But they could do so only because the role of Quaker insti­tu­tions had fun­da­men­tally changed. Our cor­po­rate bod­ies no longer even try to take on the role of dis­cern­ing what it means to be a Friend.

We are all Ranters now

Lib­eral Quak­ers today tend to see their local Meet­ing­house as a place where every­one can believe what they want to believe. The high­est value is given to tol­er­ance and cor­dial­ity. Many peo­ple now join Friends because it’s the reli­gion with­out a reli­gion, i.e., it’s a com­mu­nity with the form of a reli­gion but with­out any the­ol­ogy or expec­ta­tions. We are a proud to be a com­mu­nity of seek­ers. Our com­mon­al­ity is in our form and we’re big on silence and meet­ing process.

Is it any won­der that almost every­one today seems to be a hyphen­ated Quaker? We’ve got Catholic-Quakers, Pagan-Quakers, Jewish-Quakers: if you can hyphen­ate it, there’s a Quaker inter­est group for you. I’m not talk­ing about Friends nour­ished by another tra­di­tion: we’ve have his­tor­i­cally been graced and con­tinue to be graced by con­verts to Quak­erism whose fresh eyes let us see some­thing new about our­selves. No, I’m talk­ing about peo­ple who prac­tice the out­ward form of Quak­erism but look else­where for the­ol­ogy and inspi­ra­tion. If being a Friend means lit­tle more than show­ing up at Meet­ing once a week, we shouldn’t be sur­prised that peo­ple bring a the­ol­ogy along to fill up the hour. It’s like bring­ing a news­pa­per along for your train com­mute every morning.

But the appear­ance of tol­er­ance and unity comes at a price: it depends on every­one for­ever remain­ing a Seeker. Any­one who wants to fol­low early Friends’ expe­ri­ence as “Friends of the Truth” risks becomes a Finder who threat­ens the nego­ti­ated truce of the mod­ern Quaker meet­ing. If we really are a peo­ple of God, we might have to start act­ing that way. We might all have to pray together in our silence. We might all have to sub­mit our­selves to God’s will. We might all have to wres­tle with each other to artic­u­late a shared belief sys­tem. If we were Find­ers, we might need to define what is unac­cept­able behav­ior for a Friend, i.e., on what grounds we would con­sider dis­own­ing a member.

If we became a reli­gious soci­ety of Find­ers, then we’d need to fig­ure out what it means to be a Quaker-Quaker: some­one who’s the­ol­ogy and prac­tice is Quaker. We would need to put down those indi­vid­ual news­pa­pers to become a Peo­ple once more. I’m not say­ing we’d be united all the time. We’d still have dis­agree­ments. Even more, we would once again need to be vig­i­lant against the re-establishment of repres­sive elder­ships. But it seems obvi­ous to me that Truth lies in the bal­ance between author­ity and indi­vid­u­al­ism and that it’s each generation’s task to restore and main­tain that balance.

* * *

Over the years a num­ber of older and wiser Friends have advised me to live by Friends’ prin­ci­ples and to chal­lenge my Meet­ing to live up to those ideals. But in my year serv­ing as co-clerk of a small South Jer­sey Meet­ing, I learned that almost no one else there believed that our busi­ness meet­ings should be led by the real pres­ence of the liv­ing God. I was stuck try­ing to clerk using a model of cor­po­rate decision-making that I alone held. I would like to think those wiser Friends have more grounded Meet­ings. Per­haps they do. But I fear they just are more suc­cess­ful at kid­ding them­selves that there’s more going on than there is. I agree that the Spirit is every­where and that Christ is work­ing even we don’t rec­og­nize it. But isn’t it the role of a reli­gious com­mu­nity to rec­og­nize and cel­e­brate God’s pres­ence in our lives?

Until Friends can find a way to artic­u­late a shared faith, I will remain a Ranter. I don’t want to be. I long for the over­sight of a com­mu­nity united in a shared search for Truth. But can any of us be Friends if so many of us are Ranters?

In friend­ship,
Mar­tin Kelley

ps: for those inter­ested, “We all Ranters Now” para­phrases (birthright Friend) Richard Nixon’s famous quote about the lib­eral econ­o­mist John May­nard Keynes.

More Read­ing

Bill Samuel has an inter­est­ing piece called “Keep­ing the Faith” that addresses the con­cept of Unity and its wax­ing and wan­ing among Friends over the centuries.

Samuel D. Cald­well gave an inter­est­ing lec­ture back in 1997, Quaker Cul­ture vs. Quaker Faith. An excerpt: “Quaker cul­ture and Quaker faith are… often directly at odds with one another in Philadel­phia Yearly Meet­ing today. Although it orig­i­nally derived from and was con­sis­tent with Quaker faith, con­tem­po­rary Quaker cul­ture in this Yearly Meet­ing has evolved into a bor­ing, peev­ish, repres­sive, petty, humor­less, inept, mar­ginal, and largely irrel­e­vant cult that is gen­er­ally repug­nant to ordi­nary peo­ple with healthy psy­ches. If we try to pre­serve our Quaker cul­ture, instead of fol­low­ing the lead­ings of our Quaker faith, we will most cer­tainly be cast out of the King­dom and die.”

I talk a bit more about these issues in Sodium Free Friends, which talks about the way we some­times inten­tion­ally mis-understand our past and why it mat­ters to engage with it. Some prag­man­tic Friends defend our vague­ness as a way to increase our num­bers. In The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals and the Younger Quak­ers I look at a class of con­tem­po­rary seek­ers who would be recep­tive to a more robust Quak­erism and map out the issues we’d need to look at before we could really wel­come them in.