Sorry for the strange double postings lately, especially of some older links. The semi automation that lets me easily share articles has started behaving particularly glitchy. I’ve adjusted some settings so that I will check posts manually before they actually go up.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
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YouTube star Jessica Kellgren-Fozard on her Quakerism
July 20, 2018
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.
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.
Money and the things we really value
July 3, 2018
I think I’ve already shared that Friends Journal is doing an issue on “Meetings and Money” in the fall. While I’ve heard from some potential authors that they’re writing something, we haven’t actually gotten anything in-hand yet. We’re extending the deadline to Friday, 7/20. This is a good opportunity to write for FJ.
How we spend money is often a telling indicator of what values we really value. Money is not just a matter of financial statements and investment strategies. It’s children program. It’s local soup kitchens. It’s the town peace fair. It’s the accessible bathroom or hearing aid system. And how we discuss and discern and fight over money is often a test of our commitment to Quaker values.
Here’s some of the specific issues we’ve brainstormed for the issue.
Where does our money come from? A lot of Quaker wealth is locked up in endowments started by “dead Quaker money” — wealth bequeathed by Quakers of centuries past.
Much of our American Quaker fortunes trace back to a large land grant given in payment for war debt. For the first century or so, this wealth was augmented by slave labor. Later Quaker enterprises were augmented by capital from these initial wealth sources.
In times past, there were well-known Quaker family businesses and wealthy Quaker industrialists. But American capitalism has changed: families rarely own medium- or large-scale businesses; they own stocks in firms run by a professional managers. If the ability to run businesses based on Quaker values is over, is shareholder activism our closest analogue?
Many Friends now work in service fields. Family life has also changed, and the (largely female) free labor of one-income households is no longer available to support Quaker endeavors as readily. How have all of these changes affected the finances of our denomination and the ability to live out our values in the workplace?
How do we support our members? A personal anecdote: some years ago I unexpectedly lost my job. It was touch and go for awhile whether we’d be able to keep up with mortgage payments; losing our house was a real possibility. Members of a nearby non-Quaker church heard that there was a family in need and a few days later a stranger showed up on our back porch with a dozen bags of groceries and new winter coats for each of us. When my Friends meeting heard, I was told there was a committee that I could apply to that would consider whether it might help.
Where does the money go? A activist Friend of mine use to point to the nice furnishings in our meetinghouse and chuckle about how many good things we could fund in the community if we sold some of it off. Has your meeting liquidated any of its property for community service?
When we do find ourselves with extra funds from a bequest or windfall, where do we spend it? How do we balance our needs (such as meetinghouse renovations, scholarships for Quaker students), and when and how do we give it to others in our community?
What can we let go of? There are a lot of meetinghouses in more rural areas that are mostly empty these days, even on First Day. Could we ever decide we don’t need all of these spaces? Could we consolidate? Or could we go further and sell our properties and start meeting at a rented space like a firehall or library once a week?
Who gets the meetinghouse after a break-up? In the last few years we’ve seen three major yearly meetings split apart, prompting a whole mess of financial disentanglement. What happens to the properties and summer camps and endowments when this happens? How fiercely are we willing to fight fellow Friends over money?
What conversations aren’t we having? Where do we invest our corporate savings? Who decides how we spend money in our meetings?
Please feel free to share this with any Friend who might have interesting observations about Friends’ attitudes toward finances!
Friends Journal Who tells our story
May 31, 2018
Kathleen Wooten asks Who tells our story
Who tells our story in this time? In today’s world of immediate news, and social media, and everyone having a twitter account and an opinion – there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Some of it might be damaging and outright manipulative. Some of it might just be misinformed people, who are confusing Quakers (for example) with Amish folks, or Shakers.
One of the reasons I’ve been so involved in Quaker media is my longtime concern that we’re in increasing danger of being defined by outsiders. A mainstream site with a page on Quakers can easily show up higher in search results than pages we create. For a long time back in the day, an entry on Quakers written by some Unitarians on Religioustolerance.com was a top hit. Google and Facebook have long had more say in defining Quaker beliefs than any of our national organizations. Even when real-life Quakers are involved— in Facebook groups, Wikipedia editing, blogging, and the original Quaker.org — there was none of the kind of formal Quaker process (for better and worse) that historically characterized Quaker publishing.
One happy irony is that Kathleen herself came in through a channel with no Quaker involvement. She writes: ” I had never heard of Quakers until I took an internet quiz in my mid- thirties.” This is almost certainly the “Belief-o-Matic” Beliefnet quiz (confirmed in comments). The site was founded as a venture-capital-fueled attempt to win the advertising religion market in the heady years of what we retrospectively call the dot-com bubble. The original quiz dates further back to a still-going site called SelectSmart, which hosts dozens of quizzes (“Which Bond Villain Are You?,” “What Pizza Topping Are You?,” “Pink Floyd Album Selector”), one of the most popular of which is “Belief System Selector.” The site is Curt and Lori Anderson, a husband-and-wife team; he was the techie who programmed the quizzes; she hunted for content. She used online sources and her local library to coming up with questions for him to plug in for the belief quiz (read some of the story here and also here). Beliefnet started hosting it independently, giving it a UI refresh and renaming it Belief-o-Matic. For whatever reasons of wonky algorithms huge percentages of people who took the test came out as “Liberal Quaker” or “Orthodox Quaker.” No Friends were involved in the quiz, hence the archaic names (few Friends have identified as Orthodox for generations).
In the 2000s, this quiz was inadvertently far more successful in outreach than any program conceived by Friends (sorry PYM/FGC/Pendle Hill donors). I think we’ve all become better at media and telling our own story but Kathleen’s question — who tells our story in this time? — is still a key one. After all, Lori Anderson’s checklist of beliefs (on SelectSmart and Beliefnet) are probably one of the most-read definitions of Liberal Quakerism.
QuakerKathleen Updated July 2018
Photons Don’t Phail
May 10, 2018
A few weeks ago I wrote about a New England Friends meeting that was working to share the electricity generated by its solar panels with its neighbors. In response, one of our longtime blogging Friends Doug Bennett, now of Maine’s Durham Meeting and formerly president of some college somewhere, wrote me about lyrics that its former pastor Doug Gwyn (this guy) wrote. I love both of these Dougs so of course I’ll share the link with you all, including this first stanza of “Photons Don’t Fail Us Now”:
it would be foolish to vote on the nature of a photon
as Quakers we simply approve
you can argue to the grave it’s a particle or wave
we just want to let it hit our roof
Eternities
April 24, 2018
Sam Barnett-Cormack brings a grammarian’s eye to our use of the old Quaker phrase, “The Things Which Are Eternal”:
To know one another in that which is eternal is to share our grace, our Light, our spiritual experience. It goes beyond the sort of knowing that might come from social activities and icebreakers; indeed, it is of an entirely different character… For it comes down to this – to know one another in that which is eternal is to know the Divine, and to know the Divine is to know one another in this way; they are two sides of one coin, and we can only promote one by also promoting the other.
https://quakeropenings.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/what-are-things-which-are-eternal.html
Could Quakerism? Yes? Will Quakerism? Ehh…
April 21, 2018
Chris Venables spent a year working with Quakers in Britain (see update below) and now asks Could Quakerism be the radical faith that the millennial generation is looking for?
The nature of religion has changed, within Quakers we have seen the numbers of young people engaging in our community fall as the effects of economic insecurity have taken hold. And perhaps more importantly, because ‘young adults’ have no time for institutions that often seem arcane and irrelevant, and which have failed to engage with the realities of life for the vast majority of people in our society.
I wish I could share more of his enthusiasm. I’m not seeing anything particularly game-changing in his article. Half of it is generic cliches about millennial preference with extrapolation that they should align with decontextualized Quaker values. He cites a few happening young adult Quaker scenes in the UK and a promising Young Quakers podcast five episodes old; he’s fond of American Emily Provance’s blog. Good stuff to be sure, but you could pick pretty much any year in recent memory and point to similar evidence and imagine an imminent surge. It’s 2018 and we’re still saying “hey this could happen!” It could but it hasn’t so why hasn’t it and what can we do about it?
Also in these contexts “radical faith” sometimes sounds like buzzwords for non-faith. Is the Quaker meetinghouse just a quiet empty room for participants to BYOF (bring your own faith)?
Quakers Update: Chris chimed in via Twitter to add that his piece’s observations aren’t just from the year of working with BrYM Friends:
Ah, I’ll take a read of yours too — but those thoughts come from my experience of being around Quakers over the last 8 years, inc setting up a new young adult group (Westminster!), visiting Qs across Britain, and interviewing many of our community over the last year!