Although the title gives potential readers the impression that this is yet another click-bait listicle, the article is by a Quaker novelist and starts with nice observations about Friends and creativity:
In the light of our high ideals, it can be hard for individual Quakers not to feel inadequate. I certainly do. We’re exhorted to “let our lives speak”, and I often feel like my life doesn’t have much to say. But I am a writer. As a community that listens patiently for the truth, Quakers provide a unique place for creativity. The faith that can sit through hours of Meeting – through boredom, frustration, distraction – is the same thing that keeps me going when I’m struggling for my next idea. We worship in silence, but we’re waiting for words, which somehow gives me faith that, if I wait in front of a blank page for long enough, the right story will come.
Mike Bevel with a funny/sad account of a kind of pathetic series of incidents.
The help we want to give — the showy, busy, selfless work — is rarely the help that is needed. And the help that is needed is often boring, with no glamour to it. So, what is to be done? I don’t know. I want to continue my spiritual journey towards/with God; however, I am worried that maybe the Quakers aren’t the home for me that I want.
The post’s title is a response Mike gave in which he channeled his mother’s voice. It’s so spot-on that I can almost hear her say it (I have never met Mike or any of his family but have friends who could deliver that kind of a line with such under-the-radar nuance that more clueless listeners might miss the acres of shade in the tone.
I’d put the dilemma of Quakerism in the 21st century this way: It’s not just that our treasures are in jars of clay, it’s that no one would even know the treasures were there, and it seems like they’re easier to find elsewhere. And how do we know that what we have are even treasures?
I gave my own skeptical take on Venables’s article yesterday. Smith hits on part of what worries me when he says current religious disengagement is of a kind to be immune to “better social media game or a more streamlined church bureaucracy.” These are the easy, value-free answers institutions like to turn to.
I’m thinking about these issues not only because of this article but also because Friends Journal is seeking submissions for thr August issue “Going Viral with Quakerism.” A few weeks ago I wrote a post that referred back to Quaker internet outreach 25 years ago.
Though Traditional Quaker Christianity is intended to convey the tradition among Conservative Friends, it may find readers among Liberals and Evangelicals. Should another generation of Quakers come forth and undertake the restoration of “the desolations of many generations,” they could find this book a resource for building up a Quaker Christian society.
I must admit that after spending my work days reading manuscripts and my commutes reading blog posts, the enjoyment of books has gotten a bit squeezed out. This looks like a useful one to try to fit it. Friend Marty Grundy reviewed this title for Friends Journal a few years ago. After posting the link to Patricia’s post, Mackenzie reminded me that Quaker Faith and Podcast has also been going through the book in recent episodes.
Marlborough (Pa.) Friends meetinghouse at dusk. c. 2006.
A few weeks ago, reader James F. used my “Ask me anything!” page to wonder about two types of Friends:
I’ve read a little and watched various videos about the Friends. My questions are , is there a gulf between “conservative” friends and liberal? As well as what defines the two generally? I’m in Maryland near D.C. Do Quakers who define themselves as essentially Christian worship with those who don’t identify as such?
Hi James, what a great question! I think many of us don’t fully appreciate the confusion we sow when we casually use these terms in our online discussions. They can be useful rhetorical shortcuts but sometimes I think we give them more weight than they deserve. I worry that Friends sometimes come off as more divided along these lines than we really are. Over the years I’ve noticed a certain kind of rigid online seeker who dissects theological discussions with such conviction that they’ll refused to even visit their nearest meeting because it’s not the right type. That’s so tragic.
What the terms don’t mean
The first and most common problem is that people don’t realize we’re using these terms in a specifically Quaker context. “Liberal” and “Conservative” don’t refer to political ideologies. One can be a Conservative Friend and vote for liberal or socialist politicians, for example.
Adding to the complications is that these can be imprecise terms. Quaker bodies themselves typically do not identify as either Liberal or Conservative. While local congregations often have their own unique characteristics, culture, and style, nothing goes on the sign out front. Our regional bodies, called yearly meetings, are the highest authority in Quakerism but I can’t think of any that doesn’t span some diversity of theologies.
Historically (and currently) we’ve had the situation where a yearly meeting will split into two separate bodies. The causes can be complex; theology is a piece, but demographics and mainstream cultural shifts also play a huge role. In centuries past (and kind of ridiculously, today still), both of the newly reorganized yearly meetings were obsessed with keeping the name as a way to claim their legitimacy. To tell them apart we’d append awkward and incomplete labels, so in the past we had Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Hicksite) and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Orthodox).
In the United States, we have two places where yearly meetings compete names and one side’s labelled appendage is “Conservative,” giving us Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) and North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative). Over time, both of these yearly meetings have diversified to the point where they contain outwardly Liberal monthly meetings. The name Conservative in the yearly meeting title has become partly administrative.
A third yearly meeting is usually also included in the list of Conservative bodies. Present-day Ohio Yearly Meeting once competed with two other Ohio Yearly Meetings for the name but is the only one using it today. The name “Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative)” is still sometimes seen, but it’s unnecessary, not technically correct, and not used in the yearly meeting’s formal correspondence. (You want to know more? The yearly meeting’s clerk maintains a website that goes amazingly deep into the history of Ohio Friends).
All that said, these three yearly meetings have more than their share of traditionalist Christian Quaker members. Ohio’s gatherings have the highest percentage of plain dressing- and speaking- Friends around (though even there, they are a minority). But other yearly meetings will have individual members and sometimes whole monthly meetings that could be accurately described as Conservative Quaker.
I might have upset some folks with these observations. In all aspects of life you’ll find people who are very attached to labels. That’s what the comment section is for.
The meanings of the terms
Formal identities aside, there are good reasons we use the concept of Liberal and Conservative Quakerism. They denote a general approach to the world and a way of incorporating our history, our Christian heritage, our understanding of the role of Christ in our discernment, and the format and pace of our group decision making.
But at the same time there’s all sorts of diversity and personal and local histories involved. It’s hard to talk about any of this in concrete terms without dissolving into footnotes and qualifications and long discourses about the differences between various historical sub-movements within Friends (queue awesome 16000-word history).
Many of us comfortably span both worlds. In writing, I sometimes try to escape the weight of the most overused labels by substituting more generic terms, like traditional Friends or Christ-centered Friends. These terms also get problematic if you scratch at them too hard. Reminder: God is the Word and our language is by definition limiting.
If you like the sociology of such things, Isabel Penraeth wrote a fascinating article in Friends Journal a few years ago, Understanding Ourselves, Respecting the Differences. More recently in FJ a Philadelphia Friend, John Andrew Gallery, visited Ohio Friends and talked about the spiritual refreshment of Conservative Friends in Ohio Yearly Meeting Gathering and Quaker Spring. Much of the discussion around the modern phrase Convergent Friends and the threads on QuakerQuaker has focused on those who span a Liberal and Conservative Quaker worldview.
The distinction between Conservatives and Liberals can become quite evident when you observe how Friends conduct a business meeting or how they present themselves. It’s all too easy to veer into caricature here but Liberal Friends are prone to reinventions and the use of imprecise secular language, whileConservative Friends are attached to established processes and can be unwelcoming to change that might disrupt internal unity.
But even these brief observations are imprecise and can mask surprisingly similar talents and stumbling blocks. We all of us are humans, after all. The Inward Christ is always available to instruct and comfort, just as we are all broken and prone to act impulsively against that advice.
Worshipping?
Finally, pretty much all Friends will worship with anyone. Most local congregations have their own distinct flavor. There are some in which the ministry is largely Christian, with a Quaker-infused explanation of a parable or gospel, while there are others where you’ll rarely hear Christ mentioned. You should try out different meetings and see which ones feed your soul. Be ready to find nurturance in unexpected places. God may instruct us to serve anywhere with no notice, as he did the Good Samaritan. Christ isn’t bound by any of our silly words.
Thanks to James for the question!
Do you have a question on another Quaker topic? Check out the Ask Me Anything! page.
Even I’m a bit shocked by the title of this post. Have I really been blogging for fifteen years? I keep double-checking the math but it keeps adding up. In November 1997 I added a feature to my two-year-old peace website. I called this new entity Nonviolence Web Upfront and updated it weekly with original features and curated links to the best online pacifist writing. I wrote a retrospective of the “early blogging days” in 2005 that talks about how it came about and gives some context about the proto-blogs happening back in 1997.
But I could arguably go back further than 15 years. In college, my friend Brni and I started an alternative print magazine called VACUUM. It came out weekly. It had a mix of opinion pieces and news from all over. Familiar, huh? Columns were made up from a dot matrix printer and pasted down with scotch tape, with headlines scrawled out with a sharpie. The ethos was there. Next April will mark its Silver Jubilee.
What’s most striking is not the huge leaps of technologies, but the single-mindedness of my pursuits all these years. There are cross-decade echos of themes and ways of packaging publications that continue in my work as editor of Friends Journal.
Long in the works, my O’Reilly Media-published “Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators” is available. The title could sort of be boiled down to “hey this QuakerQuaker.org thing has become kind of neat” but it’s more than that. I wax lyrical about the different kind of aggregator community sites and I throw a new tongue-twister into the social media arena: “folksonomic density” (Google it now kids and you’ll see the only references are mine; a few years from now you can say you knew the guy who coined the phrase that set the technosphere on fire and launched Web 3.0 and ushered in the second phase of the Age of Aquarius, yada yada).
A hundred thank you’s to my fine and patient editor S. (don’t know if you want to be outed here). I’ve been an editor myself in one capacity or another for fifteen years (I’ve sometimes even been paid for it) so it was educational to experience the relationship from the other side. I wrote this while living an insane schedule and it’s amazing I found any time at get all this down.
As luck would have it I’ve just gotten my design site at MartinKelley.com up and running fully again, so I hope to do some posts related to the PDF in the weeks to come. In the meantime, below is the marketing copy for Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators. It is available for $9.99 from the O’Reilly website.
Web aggregators select and present content culled from multiple sources, playing an important taste-making and promotional role. Larger aggregators are starting to compete with mainstream news sources but a new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggregators are organizing around specific interests. Niche aggregators harness the power of the internet to build communities previously separated by geography or institutional inertia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role. Understanding their operation is critical for those wanting to understand or predict cultural change and for those who want to harness the power of the long tail by catering to niches.
RSS feeds
are the lingua franca of the modern internet, the glue that binds
together the hundreds of services that make up “Web 2.0.” The term
stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and can be thought of as a
machine-code table of contents to a website. An RSS feed
for a blog will typically list the last dozen-or-so articles, with the
title, date, summary and content all laid out in special fields. Once
you have a website’s RSS feed you can syndicate, or re-publish, its contents by email, RSS reader
or as a sidebar on another website. This post will show you a
ridiculously easy way to “roll your own” RSS feed without having to
worry about your website’s content platform.
Just about every native Web 2.0 applications comes built-in with multiple RSS feeds. But in the real world, websites are built using an almost-infinite number of content management systems and web development software programs. Sometimes a single website will use different programs for putting its contents online and sometimes a single organization spreads its functions over multiple domains.
Step 1: Make it Del.icio.us
To begin, sign up with Del.icio.us, the popular “social bookmarking” web service (similar services can be easily adapted to work). Then add a “post to Del.icio.us” button to your browser’s toolbar following the instructions here. Now whenever you put new content up on your site, go that new page, click on your “post to Del.icio.us” button and fill out a good title and description. Choose a tag to use. A tag is simply a category and you can make it whatever you want but “mysites” or your business name will be the easiest to remember. Hit save and you’ve started an RSS feed.
How? Well, Del.icio.us turns each tag into a RSS feed. You can see it in all its machine code glory at del.icio.us/rss/username/mysites (replacing “username” with your username and “mysites” with whatever tag you chose).
Now you could just advertise that Del.icio.us RSS feed to your audience but there are a few problems doing this. One is that Del.icio.us accounts are usually personal. If your webmaster leaves, then your published RSS feed will need to change. Not a good scenario, especially since you won’t even be able to tell who’s still using that old feed. Before you advertise your feed you should “future proof” it by running it through Feedburner.
Cloak that Feed
Go to Feedburner.com. Right there on the homepage they invite you to type in a URL. Enter your Del.icio.us feed’s address and sign up for a Feedburner account. In the field next to feed address give it some sensible name relating to your company or site, let’s say “mycompany” for our example. You’ll now have a new RSS feed at feeds.feedburner.com/mycompany. Now you’re in business: this is the feed you advertise to the world. If you ever need to change the source RSS feed you can do that from within Feedburner and no one need know.
The default title of your Feedburner feed will still show it’s Del.icio.us roots (and the webmaster’s username). To clear that out, go into Feedburner’s “Optimize” tab and turn on the “Title/Description Burner,” filling it out with a title and description that better matches your feed’s purpose. For an example of all this in action, the Del.icio.us feed that powers my tech link blog and its Feedburner “cloak” can be found here:
Under Feedburner’s “Publicize” tag there are lots of neat features to republish your feed yourself. First off is the “Chicklet chooser” which will give you that ubiquitous RSS feed icon to let visitors know you’ve entered the 21st Century. Their “Buzz Boost” feature lets you create a snippet of code for your homepage that will list the latest additions. “Email subscriptions” lets your audience sign up for automatic emails whenever you add something to your site.
Final Thoughts
RSS feeds are great ways of communicating exciting news to your audiences. If you’re lucky, important bloggers in your audience will subscribe to your feed and spread your news to their networks. Creating a feed through a bookmarking service allows you to add any page on any site regardless of its underlying structure.
Long in the works, my