Tag Archives ⇒ event

Kindertransport survivors call for routes to sanctuary for child refugees

November 17, 2018
· Martin Kelley

At an 80th anniver­sary of the UK kinder­trans­port pro­gram (which we read about a few days ago), sur­vivors and Friends call for wider sup­port for today’s refugees and asy­lum seekers:

Helen Drew­ery, Head of Wit­ness and Wor­ship for Quak­ers in Britain, wel­com­ing all to Friends House, said, “We are pleased to be host­ing an event which hon­ours all those – includ­ing Quak­ers who put the Kinder­trans­port into effect. Their endeav­ours are being echoed today by near­ly 100 Quak­er meet­ings across Britain which have iden­ti­fied them­selves as Sanc­tu­ary Meet­ings and are sup­port­ing peo­ple who have fled from dan­ger in their home coun­tries. We are glad that these Meet­ings and the peo­ple they are sup­port­ing are rep­re­sent­ed at today’s event. We join them in press­ing for more safe passages.” 

http://​www​.ekkle​sia​.co​.uk/​n​o​d​e​/​2​7​200

Quaker Abolitionist Benjamin Lay Remembered

May 8, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing has pub­lished a piece on the reha­bil­i­ta­tion of dis­owned sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry Quak­er rab­bler­ouser Ben­jamin Lay

On Sat­ur­day, April 21, 2018, Abing­ton Month­ly Meet­ing unveiled a bur­ial stone for Sarah & Ben­jamin Lay. The event which fea­tured open­ing remarks by author Mar­cus Redik­er and local res­i­dent and Quak­er Avis Wan­da McClin­ton was fol­lowed by a gath­er­ing in the meet­ing­house in the man­ner of a Friends Memo­r­i­al Meeting.

Abing­ton was the first Friends meet­ing I ever vis­it­ed and I’ve loved the sto­ry of Lay since the time I first stum­bled on it (even as a kid I was enough of a local his­to­ry nerd that I might have read of Lay’s antics before I ever met a Quak­er). I’m per­son­al­ly so hap­py to see him get this wider recog­ni­tion. The PYM piece is all-text but much of the grave mark­er cer­e­mo­ny has been post­ed to YouTube.

Quakers in Politics Live Web Panel (March 22 2018)

March 9, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Back last August, Greg Woods noticed that there were some Quak­ers run­ning for U.S. Con­gres­sion­al seats. While modern-day Quak­er politi­cians are not unheard of, they’re also not par­tic­u­lar­ly com­mon and it seemed like there was a bumper crop. The idea to inter­view them took on a momen­tum, even as we start­ed to learn about more can­di­dates. It’s grown into a Quak­ers in Pol­i­tics Live Web Pan­el set to take place on Thurs­day, March 22nd at 3pm EDT. There’s six con­firmed Quak­er can­di­dates and the event is co-sponsored by the Earl­ham School of Reli­gion and Friends Jour­nal. The mod­er­a­tor will be Earl­ham Col­lege Pres­i­dent Alan Price.

The upcom­ing U.S. Con­gres­sion­al mid-term elec­tions already have at least sev­en Quak­er can­di­dates for office. How does their Quak­er faith inform these can­di­dates’ desires to run for Con­gress? What advice would they have for oth­er Quak­ers want­i­ng to run for office in the future?

It’s a pret­ty inter­est­ing bunch and I’m look­ing for­ward to lots of good ques­tions about the inter­sec­tion of faith and pol­i­tics in 2018.


2018 Quakers in Politics Web Panel (Updated Nov 2018)

2018 Quak­ers in Pol­i­tics Web Pan­el (Updat­ed Nov 2018) 

The upcom­ing U.S. Con­gres­sion­al mid-term elec­tions already have at least sev­en Quak­er can­di­dates for office. How does their…

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

How and why we gather as Friends (in the 21st Century)

February 15, 2009
· Martin Kelley

On a recent evening I met up with Gath­er­ing in Light Wess, who was in Philadel­phia for a Quaker-sponsored peace con­fer­ence. Over the next few hours, six of us went out for a great din­ner, Wess and I test­ed some tes­ti­monies,
and a revolv­ing group of Friends end­ed up around a table in the
con­fer­ence’s hotel lob­by talk­ing late into the night (the links are
Wess’ reviews, these days you can reverse stalk him through his Yelp
account). 

Of all of the many peo­ple I spoke with, only one had any kind of
fea­tured role at the con­fer­ence. With­out excep­tion my conversation
part­ners were fas­ci­nat­ing and insight­ful about the issues that had
brought them to Philadel­phia, yet I sensed a per­vad­ing sense of missed
oppor­tu­ni­ty: hun­dreds of lives rearranged and thou­sands of air miles
flown most­ly to lis­ten to oth­ers talk. I spent my long com­mute home
won­der­ing what it would have been like to have spent the week­end in the
hotel lob­by record­ing ten minute Youtube inter­views with as many
con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants as I could. We would have end­ed up with a
snap­shot of faith-based peace orga­niz­ing cir­ca 2009.

Next week­end I’ll be burn­ing up more of the ozone lay­er by fly­ing to Cal­i­for­nia to co-lead a work­shop with Wess and Robin M. (details at Con​ver​gent​Friends​.org,
I’m sure we can squeeze more peo­ple in!) The par­tic­i­pant list looks
fab­u­lous. I don’t know every­one but there’s at least half a dozen
peo­ple com­ing who I would be thrilled to take work­shops from. I really
don’t want to spend the week­end hear­ing myself talk! I also know there
are plen­ty of peo­ple who can’t come because of com­mit­ments and costs.

So we’re going to try some exper­i­ments – they might work, they might not. On Quak­erQuak­er, there’s a new group for the event and a dis­cus­sion thread open to all QQ mem­bers (sign up is quick and pain­less). For those of you com­fort­able with the QQ tag­ging sys­tem, the Deli­cious tag for the event is “quaker.reclaiming2009”. Robin M has pro­posed using #con­ver­gent­friends as our Twit­ter hashtag. 

There’s all sorts of mad things we could try (Ustream video or live
blog­ging via Twit­ter, any­one?), wacky wacky stuff that would distract
us from what­ev­er mes­sage the Inward Christ might be try­ing to give us.
But behind all this is a real ques­tions about why and how we should
gath­er togeth­er as Friends. As the bank­ing sys­tem tanks, as the environment
strains, as com­mu­ni­ca­tions costs drop and we find our­selves in a curi­ous new econ­o­my, what chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties open up?

Sharing our Quaker event photos

June 1, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Over on the pho­to shar­ing ser­vice Flickr, I’m notic­ing a bunch of pho­tos from this week’s Britain Year­ly Meet­ing ses­sion. One con­trib­u­tor has tagged (labelled) all her pho­tos with “britainyearlymeeting06” which means they’re all avail­able on one page. Cool, but what would be even cool­er is if every Flickr user at the event used the same tag. We’d then have a near­ly real-time group pho­to essay of the year­ly meet­ing sessions.

So this year I’m going to tag all my per­son­al pho­tos from next mon­th’s Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence Gath­er­ing of Friends as “FGCgathering06″. I invite any oth­er Flickr-using atten­ders to do the same. While I do work at FGC, please note this is not any sort of offi­cial FGC deci­sion, it’s just my own idea to share pho­tos and to see how we can use these online net­works to share and pro­mote Quak­erism. In a few weeks you’ll start see­ing entries via flickr and tech­no­rati. I’ll prob­a­bly start with a few pic­tures of the book­store truck being loaded for its cross-country trek. Update: one embed­ded below.
Blog posts:
If your blog­ging sys­tem does­n’t sup­port the use of tags, then sim­ply add this line in the bot­tom of each of your Gathering-related posts:

Update: here’s one: