flyer Posts

• Chris M. is almost famous!
  One of my claims to NJ fame is that I went to elementary school with the daughter of Peter O. Wacker, the most famous geographer of New Jersey in the world. In fact, they lived on our street, even!
  (tags: comment)
• Peggy P lifts up favorite sentence in recent Kenyan epistle, gives her amen
  Faith-based institutions should continue sending clear non-partisan, non-inflammatory messages that resonate the life affirming, faith-filled, truth and justice-guided, peace-building, comfort-giving, reconciliation-oriented...messages of their faith.
  (tags: quaker quaker.kenya quaker.witness)
• San Francisco Meeting's Bible class flyer
  The Bible belongs to us... Our Quaker faith is deeply rooted in the Bible, and exploring the Bible can nourish our faith, enrich our understanding of our history, and provide language for communicating about the ineffable
  (tags: quaker quaker.christianity)
• Nodding back to Chris
  Featured photo on current QQ banner
  (tags: comment)
• Social Jeanne on etiquette's block to sharing belief
  One might be able to argue that some of these things are particularly Quaker, but most of them aren't. How is acting like you hold the keys to virtue and proper etiquette a Quaker way of conveying these beliefs? Will those keys get you into God's kingdom?
  (tags: quaker quaker.class quaker.outreach comment)

Those Quaker Ranters readers who are coming to the FGC Gathering but haven't lost internet access yet might be interested in some of the events the Advancement & Outreach committee is sponsoring over the week. There will be a flyer in the registration packets (all these events will take place in Admin 203). For those not coming, I suspect I'll have some sort of Gathering round-up post at some point after it's all done. I'm also co-hosting a Monday night interest group with LizOpp and Robin: "On Fire! Renewing Quakerism through a Convergence of Friends." For details, see Liz's post or Robin's post.

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The FGC Advancement and Outreach committee is sponsoring afternoon events during four days of Gathering. Come share your outreach ideas, learn about FGC and support the growth of Quakerism!

All Friends Welcome, 1:30-3:00

Monday: "What Do Quakers Believe?" Come talk about the range of Quaker beliefs, from Robert Barclay to the present day, and explore what binds us together as Friends. Convened by Deborah Haines.

Wednesday: A special welcome to Friends from Pacific, North Pacific and Intermountain Yearly Meetings. Come talk about the spirit, concerns, and Quaker ways of these three independent yearly meetings.

Thursday: Visitors from Freedom Friends Church will join us to talk about the witness of this unique independent evangelical Friends Church.

Outreach Hours, 3:15-4:15

Sunday: Visibility. Interested in publicizing your meeting and getting the Quaker message out into your community? Friends are invited to come share their stories and questions and pick up a free copy of our "Inreach-Outreach Packet for Small Meetings." Jane Berger will host.

Monday: Isolated Friends & New Worship Groups. Learn about FGC's new service for Friends and seekers who live far from any meeting or worship group. Are you interested in helping to nurture new worship groups? Come find out what resources are available from the FGC Advancement Committee, and share your stories and ideas.

Wednesday: Friends interested in affiliation. FGC is an association of 14 yearly meetings and regional groups and 9 directly affiliated monthly meetings. A&O clerk Deborah Haines will talk about the work of FGC and the benefits of affiliation.

Thursday: Spiritual Hospitality. It's easy to feel isolated even within a local meeting. A&O coordinator Martin Kelley will talk about some strategies to overcome the isolations of age, theology, race, lifestyle, etc. What can meetings do to help these Friends not feel isolated?

Quakers Uniting in Publications, better known as "QUIP", is a collection of 50 Quaker publishers, booksellers and authors committed to the "ministry of the written word." I often think of QUIP as a support group of sorts for those of us who really believe that publishing can make a difference. It's also one of those places where different branches of Friends come together to work and tell stories. QUIP sessions strike a nice balance between work and unstructured time, it's has its own nice culture of friendliness and cooperation that are the real reason many of us go every year.

In honor of Income Tax Day here in the U.S., here are some links to sites on war tax resistance.

There are many ways to participate in militarism. The most obvious is to personally fight in a war, but another way is in financing its deeds. The United States military makes up a huge portion of the federal budget. It is estimated that 53 percent of income taxes go to pay for past, present and future wars. Nothing else comes close to this expenditure, and budget-cutting in education, environmental protection and the social safety net is a direct result of decisions to put the money into preparation for war. For more on the reasons for this form of protest, check out Nonviolence.org's own guide to war tax resistance and the very excellent Philosophy of Nonviolence.

The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is a coalition of local groups, alternative funds, contacts and counselors working to support, coordinate, and publicize conscientious objection to the payment of taxes for war. The NWTRCC coalition protests a tax system that supports war, and it redirects tax dollars to fund life-affirming efforts.

The War Tax Resistance Penalty Fund is an organization that ties together war tax resisters and their supports. When penalties are levied, all the contributors pay a small amount to help defray the resister's costs. This is a way for to support the principle of war tax resistance for those who don't feel ready to resist themselves.

Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes is a popular flyer from the War Resisters League.

The National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund advocates for legislation enabling conscientious objection to war and to have the military portion of objectors' federal income taxes directed to a special fund for projects that enhance peace.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation and the War Resisters League both regularly compile statistics about military spending as a percentage of income tax.

Hang up on War is a campaign launched in October 2003 by a coalition including WRL and NWTRCC.

The War Resisters League has issued its famous "Pie Chart" flyer showing Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes. An annual tradition, this flyer breaks down U.S. government spending.

This year 49% of income-tax generated federal spending is going to the military. That's $536 billion for current military spending, $349 billion to pay for past military spending and a projected $50 billion that the President will ask Congress for after the elections.

There's just so much wrong with this amount of miliary spending. This is money that could be going into job creation, into supporting affordable health care for Americans, into giving our kids better education. The strongest defense a country could ever have is investing in its people, but that's impossible if we're spending half of our taxes on bombs. And having all these bombs around makes us itchy to use them and gives us the ability to fight wars largely by ourselves.

The WRL flyer always goes beyond mere number crunching, however, to show some of the human impact of this inbalanced spending. This time we have listings of "lives lost in Afghanistan & iraq," lives lost due to poor health standards around the world, the lost freedom of prisoners being held by the U.S. against the Geneva Accords, and the friends "lost and found" by the U.S.'s unilateralist war.

Almost a month ago I question a "newly-launched campaign of phone tax resistance":http://www.hanguponwar.org in a post called "Beating Dead Horses":www.nonviolence.org/articles/000194.php. Robert Randall, a dear friend who I haven't seen in far too long, wrote in last night explaining how the new campaign came about and some of its goals. bq. Hi, Martin.    I'm all for coming up with new tactics, and I think a lot of people have been doing just that. This doesn't mean, though, that we have to leave old tactics behind if they can serve us. Nor should we assume that old tactics are not new tactics for some.    Interestingly, at its Nov. 2002 meeting, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee did in fact decide to shelve a "Hang Up On the SOA" flyer because the ease of telephone tax resistance was no longer there: with the plethora of new phone companies and the unwillingness of the FCC to apply its old rulings on the AT&T tariff to other companies, we felt that it would be inaccurate to promote phone tax refusal as an easy, low-risk form of removing support for war.    Now, though, we have the possibility, through a large phone tax redirection campaign and the Internet, to learn and gather together the how-to-do-it information on all these different phone services. It may take time, but it is far from impossible. In the process, a lot of educating can be done, both of the public and of phone company employees. ease of doing it can rise and risk can be lowered.    What I like about the Hang Up On War campaign (www.hanguponwar.org) is that it did not originate with a war tax organization. It comes from the iraq peace Pledge, made up of a number of peace groups, old and new. NWTRCC is available to service the campaign, but the fact that "mainline" peace groups are promoting wtr is something which, as you are aware, those of us who are long-time war tax converters have long desired. While support for this campaign was not unanimous at our recent NWTRCC meeting in Chicago, I, for one, felt it a great opportunity to get people started toward less symbolic, real war tax redirection.    True, the federal excise tax on phone service is no more directly linked to war than the federal income tax, but it is also no less. One strategy which I favor is to provide as many avenues of ingress to resisting war as possible. This is one. We can certainly come up with others, and with better ones, but I see no benefit in disparaging what some are doing for peace. For many people, phone tax resistance is a new tactic and a big step. Let's applaud what I see as a step forward, into any kind of resistance, for groups which have often stopped short of such things, and work with them to keep moving ever forward. I trust you will be suggesting to where that might be.  peace and hope,  Robert Randall

I think I sometimes appear more pessimistic than I really am. Here are some of this week’s reasons for hope.

• Being in touch with Jorj & Sue and Barb and Tobi because of these writings (could the “Lost Generation”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000147.php be muddling towards a new coalesence?)

• A small flurry of recent talks and pamphlets about rediscovering traditional Quakerism: Marty Grundy’s 2002 lecture Quaker Treasure: Discovering The Basis For Unity Among Friends, Paul Lacey’s The Authority Of Our Meetings Is The Power Of God , and Lloyd Lee Wilson’s “Wrestling With Our Faith Tradition”:http://www.ncymc.org/journal/ncymcjournal3.pdf (PDF)

• Tony P. saying he was grieved that Julie has left the Society of Friends and caring enough to talk to her. Thank you.

• A flyer I saw this weekend, written by PYM Religious Education staff. It was a list of what they thought they should be doing and it was really pretty good (why don’t they’d print this in PYM News , it’s much better than their boilerplate entries this issue). Even more I hope the work does take a move in that direction.

• Thomas Hamm’s The Quakers in America, which just came in yesterday. It’s perhaps a little too introductory but we need a good introduction and Hamm’s the one to write it. His book on Orthodox Friends, Transformation of American Quakerism is amazingly well researched and essential reading for any involved Friend who wants to understand who we are. He’s working on a companion history on the Hicksites, which is very much needed.