Tag Archives ⇒ inclusion

British Friends survey on diversity

December 18, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Britain Year­ly Meeting:

What ways are we already diverse? Where do our strengths and weak­ness­es lie in terms of inclu­sion? Both these ques­tions need to be answered if we are to under­stand the nature and make up of this old and impor­tant faith com­mu­ni­ty that has a his­to­ry of sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to British and inter­na­tion­al equality. 

This intro doc­u­ment leaves me lit­tle unsure what kinds of diver­si­ty they’re look­ing for. Demo­graph­ic? Spir­i­tu­al? Geo­graph­ic? The one quote sug­gests that some­one hopes the results might help advance their agen­da. Is this just a one-off Sur­vey­Mon­key or will there be more to it?


Diversity: where are we now?

Diver­si­ty: where are we now? 

​Quak­ers in Britain are tak­ing part in a sur­vey to map the diver­si­ty of their faith and influence…

Quakers Quakers 

YouTube star Jessica Kellgren-Fozard on her Quakerism

July 20, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Jes­si­ca Kellgren-Fozard is a dis­abled TV pre­sen­ter with 266,000+ fol­low­ers on YouTube. She’s also a life­long Friend from the UK. She’s just released a video in which she talks about her under­stand­ing of Quak­erism. It’s pret­ty good. She occa­sion­al­ly implies that some specif­i­cal­ly British pro­ce­dur­al process is intrin­sic to all Quak­ers but oth­er than that it all rings true, cer­tain­ly to her expe­ri­ence as a UK Friend.

I must admit that the world of YouTube stars is for­eign to me. This is essen­tial­ly a web­cam vlog post but the light­ing and hair and cos­tum­ing is metic­u­lous. Her notes include affil­i­ate links for the dress she’s wear­ing ($89 and yes, they ship inter­na­tion­al­ly), a 8 1/2 minute video tuto­r­i­al about curl­ing you hair in her vin­tage style (it has over 33,000 views). If you fol­low her on Insta­gram and Twit­ter you’ll soon have enough details on  lip­stick and shoe choic­es to be able to ful­ly cos­play her.

But don’t laugh too much, because in between the self pre­sen­ta­tion tips, Kellgren-Fozard tack­les real­ly hard sub­jects – grow­ing up gay in school, liv­ing with dis­abil­i­ties – in ways that are approach­able and inti­mate, fun­ny and instruc­tive. And with a quar­ter mil­lion YouTube fol­low­ers, she’s reach­ing peo­ple with a mes­sage of kind­ness and inclu­sion and under­stand­ing that feels pret­ty Quak­er­ly to me. Mar­garet Fell liked her­self a red dress some­times and it’s easy to argue George Fox would be a YouTu­ber today.

Bonus:  Jes­si­ca Kellgren-Fozard will host a live Q&A chat on her Quak­erism this com­ing Mon­day. If I’m cal­cu­lat­ing my time­zones cor­rect­ly, it’ll be noon here on the U.S. East Coast. I plan to tune in.

“The president is pleased that the director of central intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged. The president has moved on…”

July 13, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Oh good for him.

But wait. The Pres­i­dent also defends CIA direc­tor Tenet who gave him bad infor­ma­tion. So Tenet cov­ered Bush’s bot­tom and now Bush is cov­er­ing Tenet’s so now we can move on. How convenient.

In a TV stu­dio a few blocks away Don­ald Rums­feld has the balls to con­tin­ue defend­ing the inclu­sion of the obvi­ous forgery in the State of the Union address. On a polit­i­cal talk show, he said the Niger ura­ni­um claim was “tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect” since the Pres­i­dent just said British Intel­li­gence thought it was true. Of course, the Brits have said they said it because Amer­i­can intel­li­gence had told them it was true. Again, how con­ve­nient. I almost expect some­one to say the inclu­sion of the forgery was okay because the Pres­i­dent had his fin­gers crossed behind his back as he read that part of the speech.

I think we could go too far in the who-said-what depart­ment with this speech. It was one speech, grant­ed the most impor­tant of the year, but still the big issue is that Bush repeat­ed­ly fed the Amer­i­can peo­ple dubi­ous claims about Iraq’s pro­grams to build weapons of mass destruc­tion. When­ev­er a reporter asked a hard ques­tion about these claims, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion essen­tial­ly told us there was more intel­li­gence that they could­n’t share and that we should all trust them. Well it’s turned out the Admin­is­tra­tion was wrong. This is a colos­sal fail­ure and this is the big scan­dal of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion and the biggest source of shame for the Amer­i­can and British peoples.