personal blog Posts

Over the QuakerQuaker forum, a new blogger asked "I am new at blogging. Do you have any suggestions for my site?" I'll cross-post my answer here.

I think the success to any kind of writing is to first and foremost write about what interests you. Don't worry about whether there's an audience or not: with millions of people on the internet every day there's bound to be plenty of others who share your interests. Don't be afraid to be personal, quirky and idiosyncratic, as people come to blogs looking for personality.

The most interesting blogs have an intimacy and honesty to them. My blog posts are the kind of discussions I would have around my dining room table. Friends have a tendency to downplay our opinions in public settings. The Quaker blogs have given us a place to be respectfully honest, open and inquisitive. That openness has led many of us into surprising friendships.

I'd also recommend that you keep your blog open to development. I was four months into my QuakerRanter blog before I had the first post that I would now consider a "typical" QuakerRanter piece. It often takes time to find a voice you're comfortable in and many people find themselves interested in different topics than they initially imagined. Blogs often end up being very different than the one they thought they were starting! Most blogs last about two months and are abandoned: if you're blogging because you think you should be, then the motivation won't be enough to sustain you over the long term.

Finally, blogs are social. They're conversation. Encourage conversation on your blog. Respond to comments, on the blog and also in direct emails if people have provided them. Sign up to blogs you like using an RSS Reader like Google Reader or Bloglines and read them and comment on thoughtful posts. Get to know people and try to attend the events we're now listing here on QuakerQuaker. About half of my QuakerQuaker time is actually private emails and IM conversations with Friends and the comments I leave on blogs (some Quaker, some not) are often more involved than my blog posts. It's a social medium and the public blog is just one piece of that.

I'd love to hear what advice others have, either here on Quaker Ranter or over on the Forum post.

It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool new movement I had been reading about. It would have been Jordan Cooper's blog that turned me onto Robert E Webber's The Younger Evangelicals, a look at generational shifts among American Evangelicals. I found it simultaneously disorienting and shocking that I actually identified with most of the trends Webber outlined. Here I was, still a young'ish Friend attending one of the most liberal Friends meetings in the country (Central Philadelphia) and working for the very organization whose initials (FGC) are international shorthand for hippy-dippy liberal Quakerism, yet I was nodding my head and laughing out loud at just about everything Webber said. Although he most likely never walked into a meetinghouse, he clearly explained the generational dynamics running through Quaker culture and I finished the book with a better understanding of why so much of our youth organizing and outreach was floundering on issues of tokenism and feel-good-ism.

My post, originally titled  "The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers,"  (here it is in its original context) started off as a book review but quickly became a Quaker vision manifesto. The section heads alone ticked off the work to be done:

• A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
• A desire to grow
• A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
• A renewal of discipline and oversight
• A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

When I wrote this, there wasn't much you could call Quaker blogging (Lynn Gazis-Sachs was an exception), and when I googled variations on "quakers" and "emerging church" nothing much came up. It's not surprising that there wasn't much of an initial response.

It took about two years for the post to find its audience and responses started coming from both liberal and evangelical Quaker circles. In retrospect, it's fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here's Robin M's account of first reading it) and it's follow-up We're All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it). Five years after I postd it, we have a cadre of bloggers and readers who regularly gather around the QuakerQuaker water cooler to talk about Quaker vision. We're getting pieces published in all the major Quaker publications, we're asked to lead worships and we've got a catchy name in "Convergent Friends."

And yet?

All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can't think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. A few years ago I started commuting pretty regularly to a meeting that did a good job at the Christian/Friends-awareness/roots stuff but not the discipline/oversight or desire-to-grow end of things. I've drifted away the last few months because I realized I didn't have any personal friends there and it was mostly an hour-drive, hour-worship, hour-drive back home kind of experience.

My main cadre five years ago were fellow staffers at FGC. A few years ago commissioned surveys indicated that potential donors would respond favorably to talk about youth, outreach and race stereotyping and even though these were some of the concerns I had been awkwardly raising for years, Development made clear it didn't want me around anymore. The most exciting outreach programs I worked on was a database that would collect the names and addresses of isolated Friends. It was quietly dropped a few months after I left (why not, the final donor report had been filed). The new muchly-hyped $100,000 program for outreach has this for its seekers page and follows the typical FGC pattern, which is to sprinkle a few rotating tokens in with a retreat center full of potential donors to talk about Important Topics. (For those who care, I would have continued building the isolated Friends database, mapped it for hot spots and coordinated with the youth ministry committee to send teams for extended stays to help plant worship groups. How cool would that be? Another opportunity lost.)

So where do we go?

I'm really sad to say we're still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I've recently crossed my life's halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change. How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in "Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers". Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work--in 2008?!? Britain Yearly Meeting has a beautifully produced new outreach website but I don't see one convinced young Friend profiled and it's post-faith emphasis is downright depressing (an involved youngish American Friend looked at it and reminded me that despite occassional attention, smart young seekers serious about Quakerism aren't anyone's target audience, here in the US or apparently in Britain).

A number of interesting "Covergent" minded Friends have an insider/outsider relationship with institutional Quakerism. Independent worship groups popping up and more are being talked about (I won't blow your cover guys!). I've seen Friends try to be more officially involved and it's not always good: a bunch of younger Quaker bloggers have disappeared after getting named onto Important Committees, their online presence reduced to inside jokes on Facebook with their other newly-insider pals.

What do we need to do:

• We need to be public figures;
• We need to reach real people and connect ourselves;
• We need to stress the whole package: Quaker roots, outreach, personal involvement and not let ourselves get too distracted by hyped projects that only promise one piece of the puzzle.

Here's my to-do list:

• CONVERGENT OCTOBER: Wess Daniels has talked about everyone doing some outreach and networking around the "convergent" theme next month. I'll try to arrange some Philly area meet-up and talk about some practical organizing issues on my blog.
  
• LOCAL MEETUPS: I still think that FGC's isolated Friends registry was one of its better ideas. Screw them, we'll start one ourselves. I commit to making one. Email me if you're interested;
• LOCAL FRIENDS: I commit to finding half a dozen serious Quaker buddies in the drivable area to ground myself enough to be able to tip my toe back into the institutional miasma when led (thanks to Micah B who stressed some of this in a recent visit).
• PUBLIC FIGURES: I've let my blog deteriorate into too much of a "life stream," all the pictures and twitter messages all clogging up the more Quaker material. You'll notice it's been redesigned. The right bar has the "life stream" stuff, which can be bettered viewed and commented on on my Tumbler page, Tumbld Rants. I'll try to keep the main blog (and its RSS feed) more seriously minded.

I want to stress that I don't want anyone to quit their meeting or anything. I'm just finding myself that I need a lot more than business-as-usual. I need people I can call lower-case friends, I need personal accountability, I need people willing to really look at what we need to do to be responsive to God's call. Some day maybe there will be an established local meeting somewhere where I can find all of that. Until then we need to build up our networks.

Like a lot of my big idea vision essays, I see this one doesn't talk much about God. Let me stress that coming under His direction is what this is all about. Meetings don't exist for us. They faciliate our work in becoming a people of God. Most of the inward-focused work that make up most of Quaker work is self-defeating. Jesus didn't do much work in the temple and didn't spend much time at the rabbi conventions. He was out on the street, hanging out with the "bad" elements, sharing the good news one person at a time. We have to find ways to support one another in a new wave of grounded evangelism. Let's see where we can all get in the next five years!

Please read Galante and Follieri: the Bishop and the Con Man, which lays out the details mentioned in this post.

The Diocese of Camden is in frantic spin control mode after yesterday's revelations that Bishop Galante personally received $400,000 from high flying Eurotrash con man Raffaelo Follieri for the sale of a beach house the Bishop had been unable to unload. Follieri's the guy who's been trying to buy up Catholic church properties across the country while making out with his Hollywood girlfriend on San Tropez beaches and partying it up with Bill Clinton's sleezy billionaire buddies.

It seems like a pretty clear cut case. Galante had his hand in Follieri's cookie jar. Sold his beach house to the guy who stood to profit most from the Bishop's plan to sell off half of South Jersey's churches. Oldest story in the book. Give him the cell next to Follieri's and they can reminisce about the good old days (NSFW).

I've been wondering just how the Diocese would try to spin this story as it waits for federal investigators to come knocking at the door. And today the official Spokesperson in Charge of Fairy Tales called up all the papers. Ladies and gentlemen, we present you with:

The Andrew Walton Idiot Defense

Turns out someone at the Vatican called someone at the Diocesan offices back in 2004 telling them to sell to Follieri. That's it. No one can remember who made the call. No one can remember who took the call. For all we know Follieri filled his mouth with cotton balls and did his best Marlon Brando imitation from the pay phone across the street.

The Archdioceses in Boston, New York, Newark and elsewhere told Follieri they had enough bridges thank you very much, but poor Grandpa Joe was confused and started lending him priests and giving him the keys to the beach house.

How could anyone imagine that Follieri was a crook? He seemed like any other Mother Teresa choir boy with his $10,000 suits, New York penthouse, heroin habit, convicted mob associates, San Tropez weekends and expensively-maintained Hollywood girlfriend. "Nobody was aware of problems with Mr. Follieri or his company at that time." Yeah right. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. And I'm the widow of the late John Paul II, recently deceased President of the Vatican, with frozen assets in Nigeria I'd like your help in securing. Please email me back at your earliest convenience Andy Walton, I know you won't be disappointed.

• Who's making a business from social media?
  You have a mountain of communications companies hoping to adapt quickly [and] you have businesses who aren’t as motivated to change their internal processes. But will there be a point where businesses take back their external arms for outreach to their
  (tags: comment tech)
• A painful story from a Friend wanting meeting help & accountability in homeschooling
  A member said "I oppose K-, her vision, and everything she stands for." I was stunned. The meeting was silent. No one responded, and I said, somewhat choked, that such a response made me want to take my children and never come back. I was in tears when I
  (tags: comment quaker quaker.parenting)
• Homeschooling Blog: The Feather and the Harp
  family’s Quaker homeschooling journey * Home A personal blog about a Quaker homeschooling family.
  (tags: quaker.parenting)

• Johan on vision and focusing committee work outward
  But who will see and proclaim these things to new audiences if we are so busy trying to sort out our structures, nomination processes, and interpersonal animosities that we don't take the time to discern and honor leadings?
  (tags: quaker quaker.clearness comment)
• Quakerism and Structure
  One of the key parts of George Fox's revelation was that religious structures can kill the free movement of the Spirit. My Ffriend R has advocated the practice of disbanding the Religious Society of Friends every 50 years.
  (tags: quaker quaker.convergent)

Interesting reading today about how our Quaker structures can choke the Spirit and hem in our communities. Johan M is no stranger to Quaker institutions, but in "Clerk Please" he writes:

But who will see and proclaim these things to new audiences if we are so busy trying to sort out our structures, nomination processes, and interpersonal animosities that we don't take the time to discern and honor leadings?

Susanne K echos some of these themes in her latest post, "Quakerism and Structure":

One of the key parts of George Fox's revelation was that religious structures can kill the free movement of the Spirit... My Ffriend R has advocated the practice of disbanding the Religious Society of Friends every 50 years. He believes that the spark of the initial vision and passion of religious groups only survives for about 50 years before developing structures start to choke the movement of the Spirit.

It's been about eighteen months since I was sidelined from the professional Quaker world (I work for some Quakers now, but on a contract basis and the relationship is much different). A year or two before this, my monthly meeting melted down and more or less devolved into a worship group and while I've found a more active meeting to attend, it's not particularly close and I haven't joined.

The result of these two changes is that I haven't sat in a staff meeting for over a year; I don't attend business meetings; I don't belong to any committees; I don't represent any group at conferences. After years of being what Evan Welkin called an uberQuaker, I'm an uninvolved slacker. Bad Martin, right?

Except I'm not uninvolved of course. I feel I'm doing as much now to help people find and grow into Quakerism than I did when I was paid to do this. I don't spend much time with that 2% skim of Quaker elite who attend all the same conferences and appoint each other to all the same committees, but then catering to their needs was pretty high maintenance and was never something I thought of as the real mission.

Suzanne talks about the "Sabbatical Year" meme, and of course lots of electrons fly about the blogosphere about the possibilities of the Emerging Church movement. There's a hunger for a different way of being a Friend. I know one Quaker who threatens to burn down the famous meetinghouse he worships in because he feels that the building has become an empty icon, a weight of bricks upon the Spirit (I'll leave him anonymous in case something mysterious happens to the meetinghouse tonight!). How tragic would it be, really, if some of institutional baggage was laid down and we had to find other ways to confirm and support one another's ministries?

I love teaching Quakerism, I love helping Quakers use the internet for outreach and I love reaching out to potential Friends with my writing. I'm doing all that without committees or staff meetings. No budgets to fight over, no mission statements to write.

Half a decade ago now I wrote about the "lost Quaker generation," active and visionary Gen X Friends who seemed to be dropping out in droves. We're all keeping in better touch now via Facebook but I haven't noticed much jumping back into the fray. What I have noticed is a phenomenon where Friends half a generation older are taking on Quaker responsibilities only to drop away from active meeting involvement when their terms ended. 

If we could pull together all of the dropouts together and start meetings that focused on worship, religious education and deep-community activities, I think we'd see something interesting. I envy those with less-musty, Gen-X heavy meetings nearby (Robin M showcased her meeting recently). And don't get me wrong: I also love the old Quaker ideal of the strong local Quaker community and the bonds of the community on the individual, etc., etc. But I don't see meetings like that anywhere nearby and the only clear leading I really have is to continue this "freelance" teaching, writing and organizing. It's not the situation I want but it's the situation I have and at this point I have to just trust the leadings as they come step by step and have faith they're going somewhere. Boy though, I wish I knew where all this was heading sometimes!

For any bleeding edge Web 2.0 Quakers out there, there's now a QuakerQuaker FriendFeed account to go along with its Twitter account. Both accounts simply spit out the QuakerQuaker RSS feed but there might be some practical uses. I actually follow QQ primary by Twitter these days and those who don't mind annoying IM pop-ups could get instant alerts.

Web 2.0 everywhere man Robert Scoble recently posted that many of his conversations and comments have moved away from his blog and over to FriendFeed. I don't see that occurring anytime soon with QQ but I'll set the accounts up and see what happens. I've hooked my own Twitter and FriendFeed accounts up with QuakerQuaker, so that's one way I'm cross-linking with this possible overlay of QQ.

For what it's worth I've always assumed that QQ is relatively temporary, an initial meeting ground for a network of online Friends that will continue to expand into different forms. I'm hoping we can pick the best media to use and not just jump on the latest trends. As far as the Religious Society of Friends is concerned, I'd say the two most important tests of a new media is it's ability to outreach to new people and its utility in helping to construct a shared vision of spiritual renewal.

On these test, Facebook has been a complete failure. So many promising bloggers have disappeared and seem to spend their online time swapping suggestive messages on Facebook (find a hotel room folks) or share animated gifs with 257 of their closed "friends." Quaker Friends tend to be a clannish bunch and Facebook has really fed into that (unfortunate) part of our persona. Blogging seemed to be resuscitating the idea of the "Public Friend," someone who was willing to share their Quaker identity with the general public. That's still happening but it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. I'm not ready to close my own Facebook account but I would like to see Friends really think about which social media we spend our time on. Friends have always been adapting--railroads, newspapers, frequently flier miles have all affected how we communicate with each other and the outside world. Computer networking is just the latest wrinkle.

As a personal aside, the worst thing to happen to my Quaker blogging has been the lack of a commute (except for a short hop to do some Haddonfield web design a few times a week). I'm no longer stranded on a train for hours a week with nothing to do but read the journal of Samuel Bownas or throw open my laptop to write about the latest idea that flits through my head. Ah the travails of telecommuting!

• OpenID for your own URI
  How to get personal OpenID address
  (tags: tech)
• U.S. Death Toll reaches 4,000
  The last four members of that group, like the majority of the most recent 1,000 to die, were killed by an improvised explosive device. They died at 10 p.m. Sunday on a patrol in Baghdad.
  (tags: nv)
• Sinbad on Hilary's dramatic memories of 96 trip to Bosnia
  "What kind of president would say 'Hey man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife. Oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you."
  (tags: politics)

• Flourishing Jaime wonders if pacifism really is a Quaker belief
  Quakers have made a doctrine out of pacifism when it was not intended to be so. Fox [argued] pacifism based on personal feelings against serving as an officer in the army. [Early Fds] never explicitly state that to be Quaker means to be pacifist.
  (tags: quaker quaker.witness)
• Johan M on Quaker scale in a church where there are three services each Sunday
  I was curious about how it would feel inside to speak three times from essentially the same burst of inspiration. Would it feel artificial the third time--would the inspiration "wear out"?. Would I get confused?
  (tags: quaker quaker.evangelical quaker.ministry)
• Allison on outsider pain
  I guess the way to heal in this situation that causes me pain is to forgive. First, forgive myself, allow myself to mourn the fact that the place that feels good to me is full of people that don't look like me.
  (tags: comment)

• Billboard: Gandhi quote from Friends in Delaware USA
  An anonymous donor paid for this billboard in Laurel, Delaware, for a full year starting last July. It's visible from southbound Route 13 on the left side of the highway. The Southern Quarter website has a supporting peace page.
  (tags: quaker.signs quaker)
• Johan M: what do church signboards tell the visitor?
  At some point, the meetinghouse sign came up. Several of us confessed our dissatisfaction at what it says. I said that what I really want on our sign is simply this: "We gather here every Sunday at 10:30 to meet with God. Please join us."
  (tags: quaker.signs)
• Ironic & iconic outreach posters from Olympic View Friends Church, Washington USA
  Pop culture mashups, many re-purposing images from the 1950s.
  (tags: quaker quaker.signs)
• 2006 Quaker billboard along Philadelphia highway
  "Peace is Possible," it says. [The location] is probably known best by those who listen to the traffic reports as a place where traffic often backs up. So for two weeks, people stuck in traffic get to meditate on the metaphysics of peace.
  (tags: quaker.signs)
• Chuck Fager's compares meetinghouse signs
  "Quakers?? I thought they all died out." Such confusion is embarrassing, but all too understandable, in view of the fact that so many meetings are all but invisible, even in their own communities. How bad does it get?
  (tags: quaker.signs)
• NYTimes: Atlantic Monthly website gets an overhaul
  The Web site "functioned for too long as just a marketing arm for the print magazine, rather than publication in its own right," said the editor in chief. For years, he said, "it was a very small number of people, working very hard, who kept it alive."
  (tags: tech tech.internetculture)
• LizOpp on borrowing from other traditions what we have ourselves
  What does it say about the condition of our meetings and of our Religious Society when we ourselves don't know enough about our own tradition that we go reaching into another faith tradition...? And religion, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
  (tags: quaker quaker.influences)
• Friendly Funnel on seeking as end in itself
  Sometimes I feel that we Seekers are afraid of finding the Truth, because we wouldn't know what to do with it then. If we are not Seeking, then what are we doing? And this is, I think, a flaw of ours: that we have become connected to the idea of Seeking
  (tags: quaker quaker.alienation)
• Robin M on Quaker committees falling apart
  What if the previous clerk was rightly led to stop? Met with the new clerk, gave the new person all their materials, advice, and best wishes? In both cases, I thought the transition had gone pretty well. I was wrong.
  (tags: quaker quaker.process comment)
• Friendly Funnel: does Quakerism just have class limitations?
  The question of why more people weren't Quakers was raised. One weighty Friend had a simple answer: "Because Quakerism is a religion of Seekers, and most people prefer having answers instead of more questions."
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach)
• Friend Eden Grace interviewed by PRI radion on violence in Kenya
  The violence in Kenya today was especially fierce in the western town of Kisumu. Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with long-time Kisumu resident Eden Grace.
  (tags: quaker quaker.audio quaker.witness quaker.kenya)
• Ben L on Quaker Quest's arrival in staid Philadelphia
  Quaker Quest, with its commitment to 21st century P.R., well designed glossy posters and brochures is a way to draw new and "frightening" people to us. QQ is a direct affront to the Quietest pall which has been hanging, smog-like, over my Yearly Meeting.
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach quaker.liberal)
• Thin Place Dan with personal theories about Quaker Jargon and a beginning lexicon
  Soon after I began attending Quaker meetings, I became aware that Quakers have their own meanings for some words and phrases that are different from the meanings used by non-Quakers. That kind of jargon frequently appears in cultural or vocational groups.
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach)
• Imperfect Eileen on hearing one another
  After eight years of threshing sessions, discussions, meetings for worship for business, personal conversations, and called meetings for worship, I have the sense that we still have not totally heard each other. We can't just wait this out.
  (tags: quaker quaker.alienation quaker.process)

Apologies to The Church Lady for the title (and apologies to Gregg K, I'm sure the actual sermon on hell from this Newburgh Friends Church pastor is more interesting than anything on Saturday night TV). The parenting links are a start toward a parenting page on QuakerQuaker. Those wanting to help should tag their Del.icio.us bookmarks and Flickr photos as "quaker.parenting"

• Susan Tannehill in Friends Journal: Parenting for Adulthood
  Our children, ages 12 and 8, are being raised within our meeting. Many times in my life as a Friendly parent I find myself not wanting to choose between two alternatives but to look at both of them and find some ground between them.
  (tags: quaker.parenting quaker.friendsjournal)
• Blog: Tree of Life Homeschool
  We're Quaker homeschoolers following the Enki approach to education and just beginning our journey. This is a personal scrapbook, a way for us to connect with other Quaker families and Enki homeschoolers.
  (tags: quaker.parenting)
• Gregg K preaches about hell!
  [M]y attempt to be faithful to obey the leadings of the Spirit for this particular group who are my spiritual community. I would guess that we may have ample opportunity to broaden the discussion. [Follow link in post for sermon]
  (tags: quaker quaker.christianity)
• Susanne K on the fruits of discernment
  What I have learned about discernment is to expect that if I am on the right path, on God's path for me, I will experience the "fruits of the spirit" - a sense of peace and "rightness" at a deeper level than personal emotions of joy, anger, or s
  (tags: quaker quaker.clearness)
• Imperfect Eileen on discernment in children
  I've been thinking about trusting the discernment of our children. It seems to bring together two huge and difficult questions: How do we know if someone else is truly listening to God's guidance? And how do we prepare our children to be adults?
  (tags: quaker quaker.clearness quaker.parenting)
• Chris M recounts sharing Quaker silence with at non-Quaker board retreat
  I helped facilitate a session on Quaker silence as one part of a board retreat for a local organization. We only had 15 minutes scheduled for the actual silence, and most of the group were not Quakers, so we called it "silent reflection/worship time."
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach)

• Jesusland Revo: If not "secular," then what?
  Critiqued over "use of the categories of 'secular progressive' and 'progressive evangelical.' There has got to be some acceptable way for us to talk about these two different cultures. Yes, they overlap. (More and more, I’m an example of that myself.)"
  (tags: relgion comment)
• Richard M on sexual double standards
  Our greater awareness of the testimony of equality makes such a double standard unacceptable now that we fully see it. But once seen how is the discrepancy to be fixed?.. Elimination... does not necessarily imply a low standard for everyone.
  (tags: quaker quaker.sexuality)
• Raised Anna surveys the issues of New York Yearly Meeting's dual affiliation (via QuakerQuaker.org)
  I spoke that soon would come a time when God would tell us 'you are healed, stand up and walk' and we as a body will stand whole and healed anew. The time Friends is coming for us to stand and walk.
  (tags: quaker quaker.fum quaker.fgc quaker.newyork-ym)
• Liz posts Marshall channeling "Early Minsiter" reminding us who's in charge of gospel order
  Just speaking personally, it seems to me that the answers to all these questions become fairly obvious, once we understand that it is God who is in charge and not ourselves!
  (tags: quaker quaker.conservative quaker.christianity comment)

• In Japan Half The Top Selling Books Are Written On Mobile Phones
  Half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones... Mobile phone novels... have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, “turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns."
  (tags: publishing)
• "Why can’t we be Friends?", Kirk W finds Quaker video on YouTube
  It’s a good mix of earnest effort and teenage humor. They’ve got the Quaker Oats gag in there (several times) but they manage to get past that. They even have some of our Friends in it.
  (tags: comment)
• Video: Quakers Rock (via QuakerQuaker.org)
  High school history project video . "Why the Quakers in the Middle Colonies of the Colonial Era were better,.. a very funny film staring superspeed native beating and a transvestite Scarlett O'Hara." Warning: Oat jokes, non-PC humor. (via Kirk W)
  (tags: quaker quaker.youth quaker.depictions)
• Peter B on reading Marcus Borg on reading the Bible
  That’s me in a nutshell—my personal faith and practice in five simple sentences—and the first bit could just as well have been a quote from George Fox with the language updated and the thee’s and thou’s taken out.
  (tags: quaker quaker.liberal quaker.christianity)
• Sheffield Gordon on the relationship of individual and community
  If we fail to make the distinction between community, fellowship and friendship [then] we will allow ourselves to become subsumed into the overwhelming individualism of our age, and we will become merely another political action group.
  (tags: quaker quaker.witness)
• Six Apart sells its LiveJournal service to the Russians
  "The company continues to lead in the blogging and social media industry with the Movable Type Publishing Platform, the TypePad hosted blogging service, and Vox, a free blogging service for friends and families."
  (tags: tech tech.movabletype)

Since I use this blog as a bit of a personal journal, to remember dates and happenings, I should dutifully note that last night was the time four year old Theo pushed two year old Francis off the footstool while brushing teeth, causing said Francis to fall precipitously against the bathtub and open a nasty gash in his chin. Three hours and a Martin/Francis emergency room visit later there were four stitches in the poor guy's chin. I'll spare you all a description of the initial mess or the difficulty of holding down a screaming child while the doctor tries to put the stitches in. Everything is fine now. And no, no photos or Youtube videos of the proceedings. Maybe I'll snap a picture of the stitches so Francis can see just where that scar came from!

Over on Eileen Flanagan's Imperfect Serenity, there's an interesting post on blog publicity, "Blogging dilemmas," inspired in part by Robin M"'s recent "How did you get here?" post. Both bring up interesting questions about the role of blogs in community building and the location of that line that separates good blogging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Readers will probably be unsurprised to learn that I use Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quaker blogosphere. I act as a kind of community organizer and my searches are for interesting posts talking about Quakers (until reading Eileen's post I hadn't check my Technorati "rank" in months). Many people's first introduction to QuakerQuaker.org is getting linked from it, and I suspect I've accidentally outed a few beginning bloggers who hadn't told anyone of their new blog!

I have a professional blog on web design and analytics (with a somewhat off-topic but satisfying post on top at the moment) and separating that out has allowed me to use this personal blog, QuakerRanter, for whatever I like. Most regularly readers would say it focuses on Quakerism and cute kid pictures and while those are the most common posts, the most read posts are the minor fascinations I indulge myself with occasionally. Quaker plain dress is something I practice but don't think about most of the time (806 readers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfairly unpopular baby names (627 visits). I've also detailed some outings to semi-legendary South Jersey haunts (317) and score high on searches to them.

The conventional wisdom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would probably say these off-topic posts are distracting my core audience. Perhaps, but they're infrequent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps people to know I'm not just obsessed with one topic. Being a part of a real community means knowing each other in all of our quirks. I'm more tender and forgiving of other Quaker bloggers when I know more of their story: it puts what they say into a context that makes it sound more lived, less ideological. There's certainly good reasons for tightly-focused professional blogs (I'd drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they started posting kids pictures!), but as more people read posts through feeds and aggregators I wonder if there's going to be as much pressure for personal, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus.

We all have diverse, quirky interests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pander to particular audiences and boy, are they boring! A certain degree of idiosyncrasy and subjective orneriness is probably essential. Personality is at least as important as focus.

PS: I'm also interested in making sure I don't loose the core audience with all my side trips, hence the "latest Quaker posts" at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will eventually get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Reader after Eileen's is Avinish Kaushik's Blog Metrics: Six recommendations for measuring your success. Parts of it are probably a bit technical for most QR readers but it's useful for thinking about blogs as outreach.

• Zach Alexander
  A new web home: "In the near future, I hope to be posting thoughts here about: politics, psychology, gender, design, food, fashion, post-religious spirituality, music, etc…"
  (tags: friends)
• Chris M. on the "convergent" tone of Wilmer Cooper
  Cooper wrote the Religious Society of Friends "survival may well depend on a rediscovery of its identity within the context of its own history, coupled with an effort to interpret that identity in a relevant way to a constantly changing world."
  (tags: quaker quaker.convergent comment)
• Qr Oats Cherice on Quaker use of queries
  I noticed tonight that the queries were probably the Quaker version of catechism... Quakers ask open-ended questions whose responses should come out of intensely personal experiences of the Divine.
  (tags: quaker quaker.clearness)
• Friendly Funnel wants a sister-meeting program to learn each other across divides
  The goal wouldn’t be to “convert” the other MM to our way of worship, but to exchange ideas and foster dialog. Then maybe once a year, we’d do an exchange:my MM would send one member to visit the other MM’s Meeting for Worship, and they would do
  (tags: quaker quaker.convergence)
• Gregg K on using technology to explain Quakerism to the world
  My hope is that my blogging and postmodern non-linearity (is that a word?) are a way for me to express with authenticity and integrity the values that have profoundly changed me.
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)

If you cycle through my last few months of comments, you'll see that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about who "we" Friends are and who we serve and the consequent question of why we organize into local meetings, national affiliations, blogs, etc.

Essential to this thinking has been Jeanne B's Social Class and Quakers blog. There are many ways to tease out the way culture and faith work to reinforce and sabotage one another, but class is a good one. If you travel from one theological brand of Friends to another, from one cultural zone to another (e.g, urban vs ex-urban vs rural) you'll see marked culture differences. Just take a look at the potluck array if you doubt me. Jeanne talks about the urban liberal Quaker stigma against Cool Whip and a great link she turned me on to talks about some of the ways the alterna-lefty culture can unwittingly separate itself from potential allies in social change over tofu.

Since falling out of the rarefied world of professional Quakerism a year ago, I've become more local. I live in a small, largely agricultural town in rural South Jersey roughly equidistant from the region's skyscraper metropoli (I don't give its name for privacy reasons) and residents range from multi-generational families to Mexican farmworkers to people who got in trouble up north in NYC and are looking for a quieter place to come clean. I don't see Quakers in my day-to-day life anymore but I do interact with a more representative sampling of America, people who are all trying to get somewhere other than where they are. Jesus would have been here. Fox would have preached here. But what do modern liberal Friends have to say about this world? As Bill Samuel wrote on Jeanne's blog issues of safety-net public assistance that seem like do-gooder causes for most well-off liberal Friends are matters of personal practicality for more economically diverse religious bodies (the child care program that President Bush vetoed last month is the same one that let me take my fevered two year old to the doctor last Friday).

Last First Day I heard a good orthodox piece of Quaker ministry couched in a learned language, all talk of justification versus sanctification, with a bit of insider Quaker acronyms thrown in for good effect. I love the fellow who gave the message and I appreciated his ministry. But the whole time I wondered how this would sound to people I know now, like the friendly but hot-tempered Puerto Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in federal prison, now working two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and trying to stay out of trouble. How does the theory of our theology fit into a code of conduct that doesn't start off assuming middle class norms. What do our tofu covered dishes and vanilla soy chai's (I'm so addicted) have to do with living under Christ's instruction? And just which FGC outreach pamphlet should I be handing my new friend?

Enough for now. More soon. 

Received an email from my web host this weekend: apparently they've been trying to get payment from a less-than-full credit card these last few months and just realized that their charges weren't going through. Yikes. In the past I've used my Paypal donations credit card to pay the bill on the account that covers QuakerQuaker, QuakerRanter, etc., but when donations dried up this summer, I switched to my personal day-to-day card which fluctuates depending on the status of our kitchen cupboards (currently out of yogurt, low on crackers, milk might be gone).

The bill's up to $135.90 and the next month should be due soon. Do Friends want to chip in and help spot some of this? If I get enough I'll switch the bill back to the donations account altogether.

PS: for those following links, I've been ranting up a bit about money issues, Friends, and the state of our beat neighbors here in the U.S. of A. over in the comments at Classy Jeanne and Agitator Dave's recent posts (might be awaiting confirmation). Apologies to both for my long-windedness, there's obviously some intriguing issues sorting themselves together in my head and heart these days.

• The War as seven G.I.'s see it
  "To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched." Two of the G.I.'s have died in Iraq since writing this .
  (tags: nv)
• LizOpp on trials on conflict and personal reconciliation
  "Since that reception/wake, the Friend and I continue to cross paths in the meeting. Though our respective views on God and Quakerism continue to differ, my heart remains softened and I feel I have been given a gift of the Spirit."
  (tags: checkback)

There's an interesting discussion in the comments from my last post about Convergent Friends and Ohio Conservatives. and one of the more interesting comes from a commenter named Diane. My reply to her got longer and longer and filled with more and more links till it makes more sense to make it its own post. First, Diane's question:

I don’t know if I’m “convergent,” (probably not) but I have been involved with the emerging church for several years and with Quakerism for a decade. I also am aware of the house church movement, but my experience of it is that is is very tangentially related to Quakerism.

I really, really hope and pray that Christian revival is coming to liberal Friends, but personally I have not seen that phenomenom. Where do you see it most? Do you see it more as commitment to Christ or as more people being Christ curious, to use Robin’s phrase?

As I wrote recently I think convergence is more of a trend than an identity and I'm not sure whether it makes sense to fuss about who's convergent or not. As with any question involving liberal Friends, whether there's "Christian revival" going on depends on what what you mean by the term. I think more liberal Friends have become comfortable labeling themselves as Christ curious; it has become more acceptable to identify as Christian than it was a decade or two ago; a significant number of younger Friends are very receptive to Christian messages, the Bible and traditional Quaker testimonies than they were.

These are individual responses, however. Turning to collective Quaker bodies there are few if any beliefs or practices left that liberal Friends wouldn't allow under the Quaker banner if they came wrapped in Quakerese from a well-connected Friend; the social testimonies stand in as the unifying agent; it's still considered an argument stopper to say that any proffered definition would exclude someone.

I'd argue that liberal Quakerism is becoming ever more liberal (and less distinctively Quaker) at the same time that many of those in influence are becoming more Christian. It's a very proscribed Christianity: coded, tentative and most of all individualistic. It's okay for a liberal Friend to believe whatever they want to believe as long as they don't believe too much. Whether the quiet influence of the rising generation of conservative-friendly leadership is enough to hold a Quaker center in the centrifuge that is liberal Quakerism is the $60,000 question. I think the leadership has an inflated sense of its own influence but I'm watching the experiment. I wish it well but I'm skeptical and worry that it's built on sand.

Some of the Christ-curious liberal Friends are forming small worship groups and some of these are seeking out recognition from Conservative bodies. It's an achingly small movement but it shows a desire to be corporately Quaker and not just individualistically Quaker. With the internet traditional Quaker viewpoints are only a Google search away; sites like Bill Samuel's Quakerinfo.com and blogs like Marshall Massey's are breaking down stereotypes and doing a lot of invaluable educating (and I could name a lot more). It's possible to imagine all this cooking down to a third wave of traditionalist renewal. Ohio Yearly Meeting-led initiatives like the Christian Friends Conference and All Conservative Gatherings are steps in the right direction but any real change is going to have to pull together multiple trends, one of which might or might not be Convergence.

Our role in this future is not to be strategists playing Quaker politics but servants ready to lay down our identities and preconceptions to follow the promptings of the Inward Christ into whatever territory we're called to:

From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. Matthew 16:21-28.