thoughtful 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.

Part of the playbook for American torture in Iraq and Guantánamo comes from Chinese interrogation methods used against captured Americans during the Cold War.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we're all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it's yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn't anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? "Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." And yet... it's clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever "confessions" can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it's also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It's hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it's could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

Update from yesterday's post. The new FGC Quakeryouth site is now effusively thanking QuakerQuaker for development of the "quaker.youth" tag and for extensive use of content on the site that was compiled by yours truly.

For the record: everyone that wants to share QuakerQuaker material is warmly encouraged to do so. I really want this to be an open standard and a way for us to easily share content. But please do the courtesy of contacting me first and please make sure that every page that includes materials compiled by QuakerQuaker says so and has a link.

I'm archiving yesterday's post (those wondering what the fuss was about can read it here) but I'll copy a few paragraphs below since they talk about how Quaker institutions have been working cooperatively with QuakerQuaker. I'm happy to add FGC to the list.

QuakerQuaker co-editor C. Wess Daniels and I worked with the staff of Britain Yearly Meeting to cover May's annual sessions and support their official sessions blog (Wess himself wrote for it). BYM helped publicize the QuakerQuaker tagging system ("quaker.britain-ym" in that instance) and we re-wrote the system to pull in their blog.

I'm currently working closely with staff of Friends World Committee for Consultation to cover their upcoming Triennial in Dublin. This has included my programming a custom feed with javascript support so that they can pull the QuakerQuaker material into a special page on the FWCC site itself. I've done this publicity work for Britain Yearly Meeting and FWCC for free, in the interest of sharing Friends' good news with the world.

All this work is more than just whipping up a computer-generated feed. I have a sophisticated series of searches that allows me to scan the internet daily for Quaker posts and I watch what items are being added to the feed (by trouble-makers, spammers or automation) and take out inappropriate links.

If you think of the Quaker blogosphere as a garden, I'm nurturing new plants by finding new bloggers, encouraging them with links, attention and a lot of behind-the-scenes friendly emails. I'm also weeding out the latest spam attacks and bringing human intelligence to a semi-automated process so that the material is focused, relevant and interesting. Computers don't create communities: caring, thoughtful and selfless people do. And it's not just me, it's the half dozen QuakerQuaker co-editors and the extended family of Quaker bloggers who routinely gather together from our separate traditions to swap stories, visions and faith around the metaphorical campfire that is QuakerQuaker.

Robin M over at What Canst Thou Say? has been hanging out with emergent church folks recently and reports back in a few posts. It's definitely worth reading, as is some of what's been coming out of the last week's youth gathering at Barnesville (including Micah Bales report) and the annual Conservative Friends gathering near Lancaster Pa., which I've heard bits and pieces about on various Facebook pages.

It sound like something's in the air. I wish I could sit in live in some of these conversations but just got more disappointing news on the job front so I'll continue to be more-or-less homebound for the foreseeable future. Out to pasture, that's me! (I'm saying that with a smile on my face, trying not to be tooooo whiny!)

Robin's post has got me thinking again about emergent church issues. My own dabbling in emergent blogs and meet-ups only goes so far before I turn back. I really appreciate its analysis and critique of contemporary Christianity and American culture but I rarely find it articulating a compelling way forward.

I don't want to merely shoehorn some appropriated Catholic rituals into worship. And pictures of emergent events often feel like adults doing vacation bible school. I wonder if it's the "gestalt" issue again (via Lloyd Lee Wilson et al), the problem of trying to get from here to there in an ad hoc manner that gets us to an mishmash of not quite here and not quite there. I want to find a religious community where faith and practice have some deep connection. My wife Julie went off to traditional Catholicism, which certainly has the unity of form and faith going for it, while I'm most drawn to Conservative Friends. It's not a tradition's age which is the defining factor (Zoroastrianism anyone?) so much as its internal logic. Consequently I'm not interested in a Quakerism (or Christianity) that's merely nostalgic or legalistic about seventeenth century forms but one that's a living, breathing community living both in its time and in the eternity of God.

I've wondered if Friends have something to give the emergent church: a tradition that's been emergent for three hundred years and that's maintained more or less regular correspondence with that 2000 year old emergent church. We Friends have made our own messes and fallen down as many times as we've soared but there's a Quaker vision we have (or almost have) that could point a way forward for emergent Christians of all stripes. There's certainly a ministry there, perhaps Robin's and perhaps not mine, but someone's.

Elsewhere:

Indiana Friend Brent Bill started a fascinating new blog last week after a rather contentious meeting on the future of Friends leadership. Friends in Fellowship is trying to map out a vision and model for a pastoral Friends fellowship that embodies Emergent Church leader Brian McLaren's idea of a "generous orthodoxy." Interesting stuff that echos a lot of the "Convergent Friends" conversation (here here and here) and mirrors some of the dynamics that have been going on within liberal Friends. The QuakerQuaker conversation has thus far been most intense among evangelical and liberal Friends, with middle American "FUM" Friends mostly sitting it out so it's great to see some connections being made there. Read "Friends in Fellowship" backwards, oldest post to newest and don't miss the comments as Brent is modeling a really good back and forth process with by answering comments with thoughtful posts.

Famously unapologetically liberal Friend Chuck Fager has some interesting correspondence over on A Friendly Letter about some of the elephants in the Friends United Meeting closet. Interesting and contentious both, as one might expect from Chuck. Well worth a read, there's plenty there you won't find anywhere else.

Finally, have I gushed about how fabulous the new'ish ConservativeFriend.org website is. Oh yes, I have, but that's okay. Visit it again anyway.

I've been quiet on the blogs lately, focusing on job searches rather than ranting. I thought I'd take a little time off to talk about my little corner of the career market. I've been applying for a lot of web design and editing jobs but the most interesting ones have combined these together in creative ways. My qualifications for these jobs are more the independent sites I've put together -- notably QuakerQuaker.org -- than my paid work for Friends.

For example: one interesting job gets reposted every few weeks on Craigslist. It's geared toward adding next-generation interactive content to the website of a consortium of suburban newspapers (applicants are asked to be "comfortable with terms like blog, vlog, CSS, YourHub, MySpace, YouTube...," etc.). The qualifications and vision are right up my alley but I'm still waiting to hear anything about the application I sent by email and snail mail a week ago. Despite this, they're continuing to post revised descriptions to Craigslist. Yesterday's version dropped the "convergence" lingo and also dropped the projected salary by about ten grand.

About two months ago I actually got through to an interview for a fabulous job that consisted of putting together a blogging community site to feature the lesser-known and quirky businesses of Philadelphia. I had a great interview, thought I had a good chance at the job and then heard nothing. Days turned to weeks as my follow-up communications went unanswered. 11/30 Update: a friend just guessed the group I was talking about and emailed that the site did launch, just quietly. It looks good.

Corporate blogging is said to be the wave of the future and in only a few years political campaigns have come to consider bloggers as an essential tool in getting their message out. User-generated content has become essential feedback and publicity mechanisms. My experience from the Quaker world is that bloggers are constituting a new kind of leadership, one that's both more outgoing but also thoughtful and visionary (I should post about this sometime soon). Blogs encourage openness and transparency and will surely affect organizational politics more and more in the near future. Smart companies and nonprofits that want to grow in size and influence will have to learn to play well with blogs.

But the future is little succor to the present. In the Philadelphia metropolitan area it seems that the rare employer that's thinking in these terms have have a lot of back and forths trying to work out the job description. Well, I only need one enlightened employer! It's time now to put the boys to bed, then check the job boards again. Keep us in your prayers.

There's been some head-scratching going on about QuakerQuaker over the last few weeks. In the service of transparency I've posted my contributor guidelines on the About QuakerQuaker page. Here they are:

Post should be explicitly Quaker: Any thoughtful posts from any branch of Friends that wrestles in some way with what it means to be a Quaker is fair game. While we all have our own issues that connect deeply with our understanding of our faith, the Blogwatch only seems to work if it keeps focused on Quakerism, on how we our faith and lives interact. Back when this was just a links list on my personal site I would get complaints when I added something that seemed related to my understanding of Quakerism but that wasn't specifically written from a Quaker standpoint (when we want to make this kind of link we should do so on our personal blogs where we can put it in better context).

Post should be timely: I’ve billed QuakerQuaker as "a guide to the Quaker conversation” and links should go to recently-written articles with strong voices. We’re not trying to create a comprehensive list of Quaker websites, so no linking to organizational homepages. While most links should go to blog posts, it’s fine to include good articles from Quaker publications. A link to something like a press release or new book announcement should only be made if it’s extraordinary. Remember that QuakerQuaker posts will only appear on the main site for a few days (if the initial setup goes well I can start work on some ideas to giave a more timeless element to the site).

Post should be Interesting: Don’t bookmark everything you find. If the post feels predictable or snoozy, just ignore it (even if the writer or topic is important). The Quaker bloggers all have their audiences and we don’t need to highlight every post of every blogger. Only make the link if the post speaks out to you in some way (it’s quite possible that one of the other contributors will pick up, finding something you didn’t and highlighting it in their description). That said, the posts you link to don’t have to be masterpieces; they can have grammatical and logical mistakes. What’s important is that there’s some idea in there that’s interesting. It might be a good discipline for each of us not to add our the posts from our own personal blogs but to let one of the other contributors do it for us.

That's it. While there are some vague assumptions in all this about the role of tradition and community, discipline and individualism, there's nothing about theology or who gets linked. This is a publication, with something of an editorial voice in that I've chosen who gets to add links and asked them to be subjective, but its very mellow and I've been happy to see contributors range far afield. Google tells us that this is one of 18.7 million "Quaker" websites and $10/month will get you your own so let's not do too much navel-gazing about what's linked or not linked. If you don't find it interesting, there are plenty of non-subjective Quaker blogs lists out there. I do listen to feedback and am always twiddling with the site so feel free to send email to me at martink-at-nonviolence-dot-org.

Alice the Public Quaker writes a beautiful post reminding us that we don't need to cut straight to the cross:

It's struck me recently that living the life of Christ doesn't mean going straight for Holy Week and the cross. I think He had 30 years of living inside love's power before he took that walk. I know that I'm only just starting to understand Love's power, so maybe I shouldn't be too hasty for it to take me to healing the sick and transforming the earth.

Josh talks about his personal experience wrestling with how his Baltimore Yearly Meeting would address Friends United Meeting policies on sexuality:

My inner Sanhedrin has been debating the issue for what will be 3 years this August. At first, the consensus of my inner counsel was "String the bastards up!", but that diluted to having BYM leave FUM. That then faded to us "Teaching them a lesson" somehow, but staying involved. This course of change from "String 'em up" to "Teach 'em a lesson" occured in just ONE WEEK! After my inner Sanhedrin was allowed to season, it became more divided.

Update: a few days ago I linked to a blog by Naaman the Ex-Leper. He grew up as a Friend in Baltimore Yearly Meeting but now describes himself as a "universalist-turned-conservative-Christian." I'm always interested in stories of why Friends leave our religious society and there was some good back-and-forth about whether a more strong-articulated Quakerism might have kept him in (no, which is fair enough). He's followed up with a very thoughtful post explaining why he thinks true Christian Universalism is impossible. I don't agree but reading it is a good reminder of how carelessly we liberal Friends sometimes apply the concept of universalism and how it too often comes to mean an abandonment of all judgements theological (he links to an interfaith FGC pamphlet that I've never found terribly convincing). I would venture that Naaman has engaged and wrestled with Quakerism a more than a lot of us still within it, which perhaps is the norm for thoughtful leavers.

And for those that haven't noticed the shuffling of furniture that's been going on here, the nonviolence.org/Quaker page is now a Quaker "links blog," with sidebar photos and bookmarks pulled from various "social" networks (join one and add your stuff!). There's an RSS feed so you can easily keep up with the the posts I find interesting.