The gray wave that wasn’t

November 7, 2018

Back in March, Friends Jour­nal and the Earl­ham School of Reli­gion co-hosted an online dis­cus­sion with six Quak­er can­di­dates for con­gres­sion­al seats. The idea and coor­di­na­tion came from the awe­some Greg Woods. I went to see just how high the 2018 “gray wave” had crested.

Spoil­ers: no wave. Four of the can­di­dates didn’t make it out of the pri­maries and a fifth was run­ning as an inde­pen­dent in a long-shot can­di­da­cy. The one can­di­date to win major-party pri­ma­ry was the awe­some Shaw­na Roberts1 of Bar­nesville, Ohio. Shawna’s one of the most down-to-earth, real, peo­ple I know and it was a lot of fun to fol­low her cam­paign. Her twit­ter feed has been a hoot:

Unfor­tu­nate­ly Shaw­na only got about 30 per­cent of the vote yes­ter­day. This elec­tion was not kind to Democ­rats in rur­al dis­tricts like south­east Ohio’s 6 and she was run­ning against an incum­bent. From my van­tage point 30 per­cent seems pret­ty good, though as my sev­enth grade math teacher used to intone in his weary bari­tone, close only counts in horse­shoes and hand grenades. 2 Still, the prospect of a Mrs Roberts Goes to Wash­ing­ton win had me hop­ing against the odds. I’d love to see her con­tin­ue to be involved: 2020 is only two years away.

Stats on everyone’s results are at the updat­ed Quak­ers in Pol­i­tics page. For any­one won­der­ing about Quak­er politi­cians, Paul Buck­ley had a nice overview of our com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship to vot­ing a few years ago.

Friendly Fire: The Making of a Charismatic Quaker

September 19, 2018

A look at the Vine­yard Move­men­t’s Quak­er roots:

When it comes to Spirit-attentive wor­ship and min­istry, the Vine­yard man­i­fests Quak­er spir­i­tu­al­i­ty in a way that is faith­ful to the Evan­gel­i­cal tra­di­tion, but tru­ly mys­ti­cal, and of course deeply Quak­er. They live out a Quak­erism many of today’s Amer­i­can Quak­ers, both Lib­er­al and Ortho­dox, would find laugh­able, back­wards. George Fox, on the oth­er hand, may get it.

The Mak­ing of a Charis­mat­ic Quaker

William Penn: commemorations and curios

July 19, 2018

The 300th anniver­sary of William Penn’s death is close at hand and archivists in the British Quak­er library share a post about their col­lec­tion of Penn curios:

The archival mate­r­i­al in the Library relat­ing to William Penn includes prop­er­ty deeds relat­ing to land in Penn­syl­va­nia, such as the one pic­tured below. There are also let­ters from William Penn amongst oth­er people’s papers. One notable exam­ple, dat­ed 13th of 11th month 1690 (13 Jan­u­ary 1691, in the mod­ern cal­en­dar), is a let­ter from him to Mar­garet Fox, for­mer­ly Mar­garet Fell, telling her of the death of her hus­band, George Fox.

William Penn: com­mem­o­ra­tions and curios

It sounds like there have been lots of momen­tos made from the elm tree under which William Penn is said to have signed a treaty with the Lenape in 1683. The Penn Treaty Park muse­um has stir­ring accounts of the storm that tore the tree from its roots in 1810. There were so many rel­ic hunters hack­ing off pieces of the fall­en tree that the own­ers of the prop­er­ty own­ers hired a guard. Their solu­tion was the obvi­ous cap­i­tal­ist one: chop the remain­der up and sell it.

Accord­ing to an arti­cle on the Haver­ford Col­lege site, cut­tings of the orig­i­nal tree were tak­en in its life­time and trees have been prop­a­gat­ed from its lin­eage for a few gen­er­a­tions now. Haver­ford recent­ly plant­ed a “great grand­child” of the orig­i­nal treaty elm on its cam­pus to replace a fall­en grand­child. New­town Meet­ing in near­by Bucks Coun­ty has a great great grand­child.

The idea of Quak­er relics and trees imbued with spe­cial prop­er­ties because of a lin­eage of place­ment does­n’t real­ly jive very well with many Friends’ ideas of the Quak­er tes­ti­monies. But I’m glad that the treaty is remem­bered. The tree had served as a sort of memo­r­i­al; with its demise, a group came togeth­er to more prop­er­ly remem­ber the loca­tion and com­mem­o­rate the treaty.

Quakers in evolution

March 1, 2018

UK Friend Craig Bar­nett describes changes in Friends in evo­lu­tion­ary terms. It’s a bit of a “On the one hand/On the oth­er hand” argu­ment that points out the strengths of both Quak­er tra­di­tion and Quak­er inno­va­tion. I want my have my cake and eat it too, to both hon­or the divine and work toward rad­i­cal neigh­bor­li­ness here on Earth using tech­niques boot­strapped on clas­sic Quak­er insights. Craig lays out where we are:

This evo­lu­tion­ary change towards a plu­ral­ist and post-Christian move­ment is not straight­for­ward­ly bet­ter or worse. It has cer­tain­ly been a use­ful adap­ta­tion for enabling many peo­ple to find a home in a spir­i­tu­al­ly wel­com­ing com­mu­ni­ty, while at the same time pro­duc­ing a loss of shared reli­gious expe­ri­ence and language

The birth of soul

March 4, 2016
Via Wikipedia
Via Wikipedia

I recent­ly lis­tened to Solomon Burke’s 196 album Rock ‘n’ Soul. Def­i­nite­ly worth a lis­ten if like me he’s been off your musi­cal radar. I espe­cial­ly like Wikipedi­a’s account of how con­flicts over brand­ing and church pro­pri­ety led Burke and his record label Atlantic to coin the term “soul music.”

Almost imme­di­ate­ly after sign­ing to Atlantic, Wexler and Burke clashed over his brand­ing and the songs that he would record. Accord­ing to Burke, “Their idea was, we have anoth­er young kid to sing gospel, and we’re going to put him in the blues bag.“As Burke had strug­gled from an ear­ly age with “his attrac­tion to sec­u­lar music on the one hand and his alle­giance to the church on the oth­er,” when he was signed to Atlantic Records he “refused to be clas­si­fied as a rhythm-and-blues singer” due to a per­ceived “stig­ma of pro­fan­i­ty” by the church, and R&B’s rep­u­ta­tion as “the dev­il’s music.”

Burke indi­cat­ed in 2005: “I told them about my spir­i­tu­al back­ground, and what I felt was nec­es­sary, and that I was con­cerned about being labeled rhythm & blues. What kind of songs would they be giv­ing me to sing? Because of my age, and my posi­tion in the church, I was con­cerned about say­ing things that were not prop­er, or that sent the wrong mes­sage. That angered Jer­ry Wexler a lit­tle bit. He said, ‘We’re the great­est blues label in the world! You should be hon­ored to be on this label, and we’ll do every­thing we can – but you have to work with us.’”

To mol­li­fy Burke, it was decid­ed to mar­ket him as a singer of “soul music” after he had con­sult­ed his church brethren and won approval for the term. When a Philadel­phia DJ said to Burke, “You’re singing from your soul and you don’t want to be an R&B singer, so what kind of singer are you going to be?”, Burke shot back: “I want to be a soul singer.” Burke’s sound, which was espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar in the South, was described there as “riv­er deep coun­try fried but­ter­cream soul.” Burke is cred­it­ed with coin­ing the term “soul music,” which he con­firmed in a 1996 interview.

Summer project: making Goop!

June 24, 2013

From 1,444 Fun Things to Do with Kids comes goop. Start with 8 ounces of white glue, food col­or­ing, water, and borax.

Com­bine glue, three-fourths cup water, and food col­or­ing in one bowl. In anoth­er bowl, mix one-fourth cup water with one table­spoon Borax, and add this to the first bowl, stir­ring until it forms a Goop ball. Remove the ball. Again com­bine one-fourth cup water with one table­spoon Borax and mix it into the glue mix­ture, stir­ring until anoth­er Goop ball forms. Keep repeat­ing the process until the glue mix­ture is gone. Then knead all the Goop balls togeth­er. Now you’re ready to play by pulling and pat­ting the Goop into strings and unique forms. Store the Goop in an air­tight container.

We only real­ly man­aged one-round of Goop (see video). We also could­n’t find any food col­or­ing on-hand and so made white Goop.