co editor Posts

It's up on the sidebar and featured on QuakerQuaker, but I want to give an added boost to my friend Kevin-Douglas' post "Why I bother with religion." I've written about the Emergent Church / Quaker experiment that Kevin-Douglass is helping to organize down in Baltimore. Check out their new'ish website, http://www.setonhillfriends.org/ Here's a snippet of today's post:

Organized religion is based in community. Being in a community challenges me. Simply hanging out with my friends and engaging my family isn't enough. The risks of such an intentional community and the support available therein offer so much more than if I just do what comes easily or go along with what exists around me. I'm challenged in community. I'm held accountable. And while it could be said that I could get this out of a gay rights group, or being part of an ethical society, the truth is that in a religious community, we all seek to go much deeper than the psychological or emotional levels. We seek to understand that Mystery -- God. We seek to understand that transformative and healing power that comes from that Mystery.

Kevin-Douglas originally posted it to Facebook earlier today and I asked if he would sign up to QuakerQuaker and post it there. There's a lot of great stuff that goes up on Facebook and it's a useful tool for keeping in touch with friends, but most posts are not visible beyond your own Facebook friends list (it depends on your privacy settings). If you post something really good about Friends or belief on Facebook, seriously consider whether you might repost it somewhere more public. If you don't have a blog handy, you can do what KD did and post it on QuakerQuaker, where every registered user has blogging capabilities (it creates a bit of a metaphysical connundrum for the QuakerQuaker editors, as it means we'll be linking QQ posts to the QQ site, but that's fine).

Trying to catch up on the reading on the One Year Bible plan: I'm two days behind. That's a point where it's easy enough to catch up but another day or so becomes hard to catch up. The whole point of this for me is not to read the Bible in bursts or even to get through the whole thing in a year, but to develop the lifestyle habit of daily scripture reading.

I'm in Exodus 30 now and the Lord is giving Moses a list of very specific laws. In 30:17, he specifies how Aaron and the priestly caste must wash their feet everytime they come into the Tabernacle and gives the what else: "or they will die!" Then God makes the law firm: "This is a permanent law for Aaron and his descendants, to be observed from generation to generation."

I'm reading a special One Year Bible, where all of the daily readings are grouped together. There's not too much commentary and I tend to skip it but the editors did feel the need to address the laws of the Old Testament head on and asked in one sidebar "Do we need to follow these laws today?" The answer was yes and no: "The moral law is still to be followed... The ceremonial laws no longer need to be followed because of the final sacrifice for since has been made by Jesus."

God very clearly says in Exodus that the laws he's giving are permanent. I don't really read much wiggle room in there. Priests need to wash their feet... and kill a certain number of lamb every year... and splatter the sacrificial blood around the alter a certain way and... I know Jesus is the new law, etc., but still it's kind of funny how literal-interpretation Christians will shrug off a direct and permanent order from God. It seems obvious that the religious traditions in the Bible differ greatly, as do the modern lens we bring to them and the two centuries of shifting Christian practices we've brought to them.

Does anyone happen to know if there's any religious group still trying to follow the details of the Mosaic Law? I wonder close do certain Orthodox Jewish groups get?

Update: I'll be adding #qqtalk to tonight's live Twitter blog of the Presidential debate. If you have a Twitter account you can just follow me at "martin_kelley" and non-Twitter users can see all the qqtalk posts by going to this "qqtalk" page. And definitely check out the fascinating discussions happening in the comments of this post!

Wess of GatheringinLight just emailed me if we might designate a "qqtalk" tag for those of us QuakerQuaker regulars who are live-blogging tonight's presidential debate on Twitter.com. Interesting idea but I'm worried that it will be too partisan. I, for one, have not been live blogging the debates as a Friend.

I've taken a lot of care to keep QuakerQuaker culturally-neutral so that we keep the focus on the faith. I want it to be a place where people from different backgrounds and values will find common ground in their interest in the role of Quaker tradition in their lives. I'm a leftie East Coast Christian anarco-pacifist--vegan, bike rider, you get the picture, right?--and while I can argue that my values jibe with my understanding of Quaker faith, I would never want to presume that you have to adopt them to be a good Quaker.

Part of the problem with Quakerism in all of its forms is that we've mixed up the faith with the culture and sometimes don't know where one ends and the other begins. That's kind of natural but it's led to a situation where we're sometimes divided against one another over the wrong issues. We also use the words "Quaker" or "Friends" as a shortcut for a range of values and don't do the work explaining how the faith leads to the values.

So in the few hours we have till the debate, any ideas about whether to adopt a qqtalk tag? Drop them in the comments. Also, if you're a Quaker who's going to be live-twittering tonight, leave your twitter name below so people can see what we're doing on an individual level if they want.

I'll start off:

I'm at http://twitter.com/martin_kelley and have been using #debate08 for my debate coverage.

• Video on Christian Quaker outreach
  A short video about the CQIM (Christian Quaker Internet Mission).
  (tags: quaker quaker.christian quaker.videos)
• YouTube: Quakers: Woolly-minded liberals?
  A British Friend gives a video response to a recent editorial.
  (tags: quaker quaker.videos quaker.conservative)

Long in the works, my O'Reilly Media-published "Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators" is available. The title could sort of be boiled down to "hey this QuakerQuaker.org thing has become kind of neat" but it's more than that. I wax lyrical about the different kind of aggregator community sites and I throw a new tongue-twister into the social media arena: "folksonomic density" (Google it now kids and you'll see the only references are mine; a few years from now you can say you knew the guy who coined the phrase that set the technosphere on fire and launched Web 3.0 and ushered in the second phase of the Age of Aquarius, yada yada).

A hundred thank you's to my fine and patient editor S. (don't know if you want to be outed here). I've been an editor myself in one capacity or another for fifteen years (I've sometimes even been paid for it) so it was educational to experience the relationship from the other side. I wrote this while living an insane schedule and it's amazing I found any time at get all this down.

As luck would have it I've just gotten my design site at MartinKelley.com up and running fully again, so I hope to do some posts related to the PDF in the weeks to come. In the meantime, below is the marketing copy for Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators. It is available for $9.99 from the O'Reilly website.

Web aggregators select and present content culled from multiple sources, playing an important taste-making and promotional role. Larger aggregators are starting to compete with mainstream news sources but a new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggregators are organizing around specific interests. Niche aggregators harness the power of the internet to build communities previously separated by geography or institutional inertia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role. Understanding their operation is critical for those wanting to understand or predict cultural change and for those who want to harness the power of the long tail by catering to niches.

I thought it might be fun to dip into the blog archives every month or so to pull up some old chestnuts:

• A year ago: Blushing over Chris M's QuakerQuaker carnival and a Quaker post Who Am I to Decide Anything about leaderless dynamics and theological creep among liberal Friends;
• Six Years Ago: Dick Cheney's Rambo Complex ("Bush and Cheney are snoring in the bleacher seats when it comes to the world's most pressing and intractable conflict. They're dreaming of cinematic glory.");
• Ten(ish) Years Ago: Stop the Zipper War Before it Starts, an editorial against Bill Clinton's Iraq sabre-rattling in the midst of the Monica Lewinski scandal.

Over on Friends Journal site, some recent stats on Friends mostly in the US and Canada. Written by Margaret Fraser, the head of FWCC, a group that tries to unite the different bodies of Friends, it's a bit of cold water for most of us. Official numbers are down in most places despite whatever official optimism might exist. Favorite line: "Perhaps those who leave are noticed less." I'm sure P.R. hacks in various Quaker organizations are burning the midnight oil writing response letters to the editor spinning the numbers to say things are looking up.

She points to a sad decline both in yearly meetings affiliated with Friends United Meeting and in those affiliated with Friends General Conference. A curiosity is that this decline is not seen in three of the four yearly meetings that are dual affiliated. These blended yearly meetings are going through various degrees of identity crisis and hand-wringing over their status and yet their own membership numbers are strong. Could it be that serious theological wrestling and complicated spiritual identities create healthier religious bodies than monocultural groupings?

The big news is in the south: "Hispanic Friends Churches" in Mexico and Central America are booming, with spillover in el Norte as workers move north to get jobs. There's surprisingly little interaction between these newly-arrived Spanish-speaking Friends and the the old Main Line Quaker establishment (maybe not surprising really, but still sad). I'll leave you with a challenge Margaret gives readers:

One question that often puzzles me is why so many Hispanic Friends congregations are meeting in churches belonging to other denominations. I would love to see established Friends meetings with their own property sharing space with Hispanic Friends. It would be an opportunity to share growth and challenges together.