The Quakers are right. We don’t need God

May 4, 2018

Well-know British jour­nal­ist (tho non-Friend) weighs in on recent head­lines claim­ing British Friends are tak­ing God out of their next edi­tion of Faith and Prac­tice: The Quak­ers are right. We don’t need God

The Quak­ers’ lack of cer­e­mo­ny and litur­gi­cal clut­ter gives them a point from which to view the no man’s land between faith and non-faith that is the “new reli­gios­i­ty”. A dwin­dling 40% of Britons claim to believe in some form of God, while a third say they are atheists

The piece is sure to get every­one’s dan­der up. It feels to me as if Jenk­ins is chas­ing the head­line to advance his own argu­ment with­out regard to how his state­ment might polar­ize Friends. But this is one of the rar­er instances in which it’s worth dig­ging through the com­ments on this one; some are bet­ter than the arti­cle itself.

https://​www​.the​guardian​.com/​c​o​m​m​e​n​t​i​s​f​r​e​e​/​2​0​1​8​/​m​a​y​/​0​4​/​q​u​a​k​e​r​s​-​d​r​o​p​p​i​n​g​-​g​o​d​?​C​M​P​=​s​h​a​r​e​_​b​t​n​_fb

Quakers find that sharing solar electricity is possible but laws and regulations make it complicated

April 27, 2018

Quak­ers find that shar­ing solar elec­tric­i­ty is pos­si­ble but laws and reg­u­la­tions make it complicated

The process proved dif­fi­cult more for legal than tech­ni­cal rea­sons, he said, and Con­cord Quak­ers hope its suc­cess “will inspire oth­er church­es, non­prof­its, and pri­vate home­own­ers to form their own groups.”

http://​www​.con​cord​mon​i​tor​.com/​s​o​l​a​r​-​p​o​w​e​r​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​-​c​a​n​t​e​r​b​u​r​y​-​g​r​o​u​p​-​n​e​t​-​m​e​t​e​r​i​n​g​-​1​7​1​2​9​177

Do Friends Query?

April 6, 2018

Doug Gwyn is next up on Quak­er­S­peak, this time answer­ing What is a Quak­er Query?

The Quak­er Queries are a won­der­ful inven­tion of ask­ing our­selves some sim­ple ques­tions… I’ve heard it said that through­out much of our his­to­ry, we were shop­keep­ers and busi­ness peo­ple, and we were used to doing inven­to­ry all the time. And the queries are a kind of spir­i­tu­al and moral inven­to­ry that Friends do well to keep track of.

It’s become kind of easy to make fun of queries. The clas­sic use was as ques­tions for­mal­ly asked and for­mal­ly answered in Quak­er meet­ings for busi­ness. As Gwyn says they were a form of account­ing. Local con­gre­ga­tions would go though a set list and send them to quar­ter meet­ings to sift and answer so they could in turn send it up to year­ly meet­ing ses­sions. I’ve seen this process fol­lowed at Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing if a bit tedious.

I could imag­ine the process being use­ful if for no oth­er rea­son that it gave Friends a chance to pry a bit into one anoth­er’s lives. Do all the mem­bers of our com­mu­ni­ty have their alco­hol use under con­trol? Are we real­ly com­mit­ted to peace in our communities?

These days a form of over-simplistic query is are writ­ten on the fly, with an implic­it “or” that I don’t always find par­tic­u­lar­ly help­ful. “Do Friends avoid the use of sty­ro­foam cups?” [or do you all hate the Earth?]. Used this way, queries risk becom­ing a list of busy­body norms to fol­lowed. We con­grat­u­late our­selves for not using paper nap­kins at a con­fer­ence we flew to.

As Doug points out, it helps to have a lit­tle humil­i­ty when it comes to queries. They’re one of the more use­ful items in the Quak­er tool­box. A good query will have some­thing to say to each of us, no mat­ter where we indi­vid­u­al­ly are in our spir­i­tu­al journey.

March 29, 2018

The hum­ble, meek, mer­ci­ful, just, pious, and devout souls are every­where of one reli­gion; and when death has tak­en off the mask they will know one anoth­er, though the divers liv­er­ies they wear here makes them strangers. This world is a form; our bod­ies are forms; and no vis­i­ble acts of devo­tion can be with­out forms. But yet the less form in reli­gion the bet­ter, since God is a Spir­it; for the more men­tal our wor­ship, the more ade­quate to the nature of God; the more silent, the more suit­able to the lan­guage of a Spirit.

William Penn

Early Quaker “Yearly meetings”

March 18, 2018

Bri­an Dray­ton is look­ing at an ear­ly form of pub­lic Quak­er wor­ship, who’s var­i­ous names (includ­ing “year­ly meet­ings”) have per­haps hid­den them from mod­ern Quak­er con­scious­ness: From the Quak­er tool­box: “Year­ly meet­ings” and related

These meet­ings often includ­ed gath­er­ings of min­is­ters, and of elders (and some­times the two togeth­er), and meet­ings most­ly for Friends. But the pub­lic wor­ship was care­ful­ly pre­pared for — usu­al­ly more than one ses­sion, often over more than one day, with lots of pub­lic­i­ty ahead of time. Tem­po­rary meet­ing places were erect­ed for large crowds (the word “booth” is used, these clear­ly held hun­dreds of people.

Bri­an’s sto­ry reminds me of when I was a tourist in the “1652 Coun­try” where Quak­erism was born. One of the stops is Fir­bank Fell, where George Fox preached to thou­sands. Most his­to­ries call that ser­mon the offi­cial start of the Quak­er movement.

But Fir­bank Fell itself is a des­o­late hill­side miles from any­where. There was a small ancient church there and then noth­ing but graz­ing fields off to the hori­zon. A thou­sand peo­ple in such a remote spot would have the feel of a music fes­ti­val. And that’s kind of what was hap­pen­ing the week the unknown George Fox walked into that part of Eng­land. There was a orga­nized move­ment that held inde­pen­dent reli­gious preach­ing fes­ti­vals. Fox was no doubt very mov­ing and he might have giv­en the seek­ers there a new way of think­ing about their spir­i­tu­al con­di­tion, but the move­ment was already there. I won­der if the gen­er­al meet­ings of pub­lic wor­ship that Dray­ton is track­ing down is an echo of those ear­li­er pub­lic festivals.

One of my Fir­bank Fell photos:

The Quaker-Methodist Connection

March 2, 2018

The Quaker-Methodist Connection

Dur­ing the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, rela­tions between Quak­ers and Methodists were cool in prin­ci­ple, but rather warmer in prac­tice. John Wes­ley, being the good Angli­can church­man, was high­ly crit­i­cal of the sec­tar­i­an dimen­sions of the Quak­er faith, espe­cial­ly its form of wor­ship, its rejec­tion of the sacra­ments, its qui­etism, and its will­ing accep­tance of women as ministers.

The demise of online subcultures?

March 31, 2017

An inter­est­ing pro­file of a niche com­mu­ni­ty affect­ed by the shift of atten­tion from community-led sites to Face­book, “How Face­book – the Wal-Mart of the inter­net – dis­man­tled online sub­cul­tures.”

Over time, these chal­lenges to the BME com­mu­ni­ty became increas­ing­ly prob­lem­at­ic. Mem­bers delet­ed accounts or stopped post­ing. By 2015, the main com­mu­ni­ty forum – which used to have hun­dreds of posts a day – went with­out a sin­gle com­ment for over six months.

Hav­ing pre­dict­ed many of the web’s func­tions and fea­tures, BME failed to antic­i­pate its own demise.

It’s def­i­nite­ly some­thing I’ve seen in my niche world of Quak­ers. I start­ed Quak­erQuak­er as an inde­pen­dent site in part because I didn’t want Google and Face­book and Beliefnet to deter­mine who we are. There’s the obvi­ous prob­lems — Beliefnet hir­ing a pro­gram­mer to make a “What Reli­gion Are You?” test based on a few books picked up the library one afternoon.

But there’s also more sub­tle prob­lems. On Face­book any­one can start or join a group and start talk­ing author­i­ta­tive­ly about Quak­ers with­out actu­al­ly being an active com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber. I can think of a num­ber of online char­ac­ters who had nev­er even vis­it­ing a Friends meet­ing or church.

Our tra­di­tion built up ways of defin­ing our spokes­peo­ple though the prac­tices of record­ed min­is­ters and elders, and of clar­i­fy­ing shared beliefs though doc­u­ments like Faith and Prac­tice. I’ll be the first to argue that this process has pro­duced mixed results. But if it is to be adapt­ed or reformed, I’d like the work to be done by us in a thought­ful, inclu­sive man­ner. Instead, the form of our dis­cus­sions are now invis­i­bly imposed by an out­side algo­rithm that is opti­mized for obses­sive engage­ment and adver­tis­ing deliv­ery. Face­book process is not Quak­er process, yet it is large­ly what we use when we talk about Quak­ers out­side of Sun­day morning.

I think Face­book has helped alter­na­tive com­mu­ni­ties form. I’m grate­ful for the pop-up com­mu­ni­ties of inter­est I’m part of. And there are sites with more user gen­er­at­ed con­tent like Wikipedia and Red­dit that hold an inter­est­ing middle-ground and where infor­ma­tion is gen­er­al­ly more accu­rate. But there’s still a crit­i­cal role for self-organized inde­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tions, a niche that I think is con­tin­u­ing to be over­shad­owed in our cur­rent atten­tion ecosystem.

Throwback from 2005: “Aggregating Our Webs

September 9, 2016
One of the first iterations of QuakerQuaker, from January 2006.
One of the first iter­a­tions of Quak­erQuak­er, from Jan­u­ary 2006.

Look­ing back at a 2005 post that start­ed to lay out what was to become Quak­erQuak­er:

Maybe the web’s form of hyper­link­ing is actu­ally supe­rior to Old Media pub­lish­ing. I love how I can put for­ward a strong vision of Quak­erism with­out offend­ing any­one – any put-off read­ers can hit the “back” but­ton. And if a blog I read posts some­thing I don’t agree with, I can sim­ply choose not to com­ment. If life’s just too busy then I just miss a few weeks of posts. With my “Sub­jec­tive Guide to Quak­er Blogs” and my “On the Web” posts I high­light the blog­gers I find par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing, even when I’m not in per­fect the­o­log­i­cal uni­ty. I like that I can have dis­cus­sions back and forth with Friends who I don’t exact­ly agree with.