Thank you to every­one who refrained from com­ment­ing after 9pm last night. I final­ly slogged through the work of putting the FGC Gath­er­ing pro­gram online in my role as FGC web­mas­ter. Whoo-whee! For those who don’t know, the Gath­er­ing is a week-long con­fer­ence held at dif­fer­ent loca­tions each sum­mer: this year’s takes place Sev­enth Month 2 – 9 in Blacks­burg, Virginia.

Now I guess it’s time to think about work­shops. Zach Moon and I are offer­ing up one called “Strangers to the Covenant” but then you know that already. Liz Oppen­heimer aka the The Good Raised Up is lead­ing one called “Quak­er Iden­ti­ty: Yearn­ing, Form­ing, Deep­en­ing” that I sus­pect will be informed by her “own expe­ri­ence of step­ping into a Quak­er iden­ti­ty”. There’s also an excit­ing his­to­ry work­shop being led by Bet­sy Caz­den, “Dilem­mas from Our Quak­er Past” (I have to admit when I saw the list­ing I won­dered if I should call Zach up and assure him he’d be fine doing the Strangers work­shop on his own so I could take Bet­sy’s). Oth­er men­tions: my wife Julie real­ly liked the Lynn Fitz-Hugh work­shop she took a few years ago.

As always there are work­shops whose lead­ers I know to be more sol­id and ground­ed than the work­shop they’re propos­ing; con­verse­ly, there are work­shops that sound more inter­est­ing than I know their leader to be. Like always there are plen­ty whose appeal and/or rel­e­vance to Quak­erism I just don’t com­pre­hend at all, but that’s the Gathering.

Any rec­om­men­da­tions from the peanut gallery? I should say that I’d like to refrain from ridi­cul­ing all of the work­shops that beg to be made fun of. It feels as if this would edge too close to detrac­tion. We will only get to King­dom by mod­el­ing Chris­t­ian char­i­ty and wear­ing our love on our sleeves.