From a post by Jamie Todd Rubin, “Going Paper­less: How Penul­ti­mate and Ever­note Have Replaced My Pocket Note­book,” I’ve learned the con­cept of the “Com­mon­place Book,” which he attrib­utes it to Jefferson:

The notion for the “com­mon­place book” comes from Thomas Jef­fer­son, who used just such a book to cap­ture pretty much any­thing: pas­sages from books he was read­ing, notes, sketches, you name it.

Wikipedia takes it fur­ther back in its entry on Com­mon­place books. The name comes from the latin locus com­mu­nis and the form got its start in a new form of fifteen-century bound journal:

Such books were essen­tially scrap­books filled with items of every kind: med­ical recipes, quotes, let­ters, poems, tables of weights and mea­sures, proverbs, prayers, legal for­mu­las. Com­mon­places were used by read­ers, writ­ers, stu­dents, and schol­ars as an aid for remem­ber­ing use­ful con­cepts or facts they had learned. Each com­mon­place book was unique to its creator’s par­tic­u­lar interests.

I really like this idea. I’ve been think­ing a lot about work­flows recently (and lis­ten­ing to way too many geek pod­casts on my com­mute). I’ve been mud­dling my way toward some­thing like this. I’m cur­rently using Ever­note to log a lot of my life but there’s scraps of inter­est­ing tid­bits that have no home. An exam­ple from half an hour ago: I was lis­ten­ing to Pan­dora the train when along came an unfa­mil­iar song I wanted to remem­ber for later. A Com­mon­place book would be a nat­ural place to record this infor­ma­tion (First Aid Kit’s Lion’s Roar if you must know, think Bon­nie Raitt steps out with Townes van Zandt for a secret assig­na­tion at a Stock­holm open mic night.)

Of course, being a twenty-first cen­tury dig­i­tal native, my work­flow would be elec­tronic. What I imag­ine is a sin­gle Ever­note page that holds a month’s worth of the bits that come along. I have some­thing sim­i­lar with a log, a sin­gle file with one line entries (lots of Ifttt automa­tions like logged Foursquare check-ins, along with notes-to-self of mile­stones like issues sent to press, etc.). I’ll start set­ting this up.

Ear­lier this week I won­dered if it might not be such a bad idea if some of our strug­gling estab­lished meet­ings exper­i­mented with the house church model. An com­menter maps out the dif­fi­cul­ties:

Speak­ing as a “meet­ing planter” (our small Friends meet­ing here was founded two years ago by me and one other Friend), I can tell you with­out reser­va­tion that, while we could meet in people’s homes, it would strictly limit the abil­ity to reach out with our mes­sage and attract oth­ers to par­tic­i­pate. You can pretty well be cer­tain that only those who already feel com­fort­able with you will come back to someone’s home, which may not include the seek­ers who really are look­ing for some­thing they can be part of.

I have seen this with other churches as well; the local UU fel­low­ship grew from ten to 15 peo­ple in the 5 years that they met in liv­ing rooms; they grew from 30 to 60 in two years when they had their own meetinghouse.

I am try­ing hard to raise the money to allow us to pur­chase and main­tain an appro­pri­ate build­ing for a meet­ing­house. Until we do, our Meet­ing will con­tinue to hide its light under a bushel, despite all our efforts to the con­trary. The desire to have a “home” is deep within the human heart, whether it is where we reside or where we worship.

The com­menter was anony­mous (update: no, he’s not, it’s Bruce Arnold of Let­ters from the Street) but I’d love to hear more. I won­der par­tic­u­larly of there’s a zone of dif­fi­cult via­bil­ity when the wor­ship com­mu­nity it’s too small to sup­port a build­ing struc­ture and need to pick a bigger-or smaller model for long-term viability.

I def­i­nitely have to dig out our copy of the DVD that was made and post some embar­rass­ing screenshots!

Most pics from the area of Grape Street, the unof­fi­cial cap­i­tal of Ham­mon­ton Hal­loween. #blog #family

In album Ham­mon­ton Trick-or-Treat 2011 (23 photos)

At home, Fran­cis shows his Happy Clown cos­tume.

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This pas­sage from Ezekiel struck me this evening:

What sor­row awaits you shep­herds who feed your­selves instead of your flocks. Shouldn’t shep­herds feed their sheep?.. You have not tended the sick or bound up the injured. You have not gone look­ing for those who have wan­dered away and are lost. Instead, you have ruled them with harsh­ness and cru­elty. So my sheeph have been scat­tered with­out a shep­herd, and they are easy prey for any wild ani­mal. They have wan­dered through all the moun­tains and all the hills, across the face of the earth, yet no one has gone to search for them…

For this is what the Soverign Lord says: I myself will search and find my sheep. I will be like a shep­herd look­ing for his scat­tered flock… I will search for my lost ones who strayed away, and I will bring them safely home again. I will ban­dage the injured and strenghten the weak. Book of Ezekiel 34.

It seems appro­pri­ate for all sorts of rea­sons. Last week the priest of my wife’s Catholic church shut it down under false pre­tenses (see savest​marys​.net/​b​log), the cul­mi­na­tion of a long plan to close it and ulti­mately most of the small Catholic churches in South Jer­sey. There are sheep that will be scat­tered by these acts. I’m also just so acutely aware of reli­gious of all denom­i­na­tions who are so caught up in the human forms of our church body that we’ve lost sight of those who are wan­der­ing in the wilder­ness, easy prey for the wild ani­mals of our worldly lusts. I take solace in the promise that the Lord’s Shep­herd is out look­ing for us.

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?

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.

Con­tinue…