From a post by Jamie Todd Rubin, “Going Paper­less: How Penul­ti­mate and Ever­note Have Replaced My Pocket Note­book,” I’ve learned the con­cept of the “Com­mon­place Book,” which he attrib­utes it to Jefferson:

The notion for the “com­mon­place book” comes from Thomas Jef­fer­son, who used just such a book to cap­ture pretty much any­thing: pas­sages from books he was read­ing, notes, sketches, you name it.

Wikipedia takes it fur­ther back in its entry on Com­mon­place books. The name comes from the latin locus com­mu­nis and the form got its start in a new form of fifteen-century bound journal:

Such books were essen­tially scrap­books filled with items of every kind: med­ical recipes, quotes, let­ters, poems, tables of weights and mea­sures, proverbs, prayers, legal for­mu­las. Com­mon­places were used by read­ers, writ­ers, stu­dents, and schol­ars as an aid for remem­ber­ing use­ful con­cepts or facts they had learned. Each com­mon­place book was unique to its creator’s par­tic­u­lar interests.

I really like this idea. I’ve been think­ing a lot about work­flows recently (and lis­ten­ing to way too many geek pod­casts on my com­mute). I’ve been mud­dling my way toward some­thing like this. I’m cur­rently using Ever­note to log a lot of my life but there’s scraps of inter­est­ing tid­bits that have no home. An exam­ple from half an hour ago: I was lis­ten­ing to Pan­dora the train when along came an unfa­mil­iar song I wanted to remem­ber for later. A Com­mon­place book would be a nat­ural place to record this infor­ma­tion (First Aid Kit’s Lion’s Roar if you must know, think Bon­nie Raitt steps out with Townes van Zandt for a secret assig­na­tion at a Stock­holm open mic night.)

Of course, being a twenty-first cen­tury dig­i­tal native, my work­flow would be elec­tronic. What I imag­ine is a sin­gle Ever­note page that holds a month’s worth of the bits that come along. I have some­thing sim­i­lar with a log, a sin­gle file with one line entries (lots of Ifttt automa­tions like logged Foursquare check-ins, along with notes-to-self of mile­stones like issues sent to press, etc.). I’ll start set­ting this up.

Emi­grants from the Irish potato famine, via Wikipedia

Peo­ple some­times get pretty worked up about con­vinc­ing each other of an mat­ter of press­ing impor­tance. We think we have The Answer about The Issue and that if we just repeat our­selves loud enough and often enough the obvi­ous­ness of our posi­tion will win out. It becomes our duty, in fact, to repeat it loud and often. If we hap­pen to wear down the oppo­si­tion so much that they with­draw from our com­pan­ion­ship or fel­low­ship, all the bet­ter, as we’ve achieved a patina of unity. Reli­gious lib­er­als are just as prone to this as the conservatives.

These are not the val­ues we hold when talk­ing about the nat­ural world. There we talk about bio­di­ver­sity. We don’t cheer when a species mal­adapted to the human-driven Anthro­pocene dis­ap­pears into extinc­tion. Just because a plant or ani­mal from the other side of the world has no nat­ural preda­tors doesn’t mean our local species should be superseded.

Sci­en­tists tell us that bio­di­ver­sity is not just a kind of do-unto-others value that sat­is­fies our sense of nos­tal­gia; hav­ing wide gene pools comes in handy when near-instant adap­ta­tion is needed in response to mas­sive habi­tat stress. Monocrops are good for the annual har­vest but leave us espe­cially vul­ner­a­ble when phy­toph­thora infes­tans comes ashore.

It’s a good thing for dif­fer­ent reli­gious groups to have dif­fer­ent val­ues, both from us us and from one another. There are pres­sures in today’s cul­ture to level all of our dis­tinc­tives down so that we have no unique iden­tity. Some cheer this monocrop­ping of spir­i­tu­al­ity, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for human race. If our reli­gious val­ues are some­how truer or more valu­able than those of other peo­ple, then they will even­tu­ally spread themselves–not by push­ing other bod­ies to be like us, but by attract­ing the mem­bers of the other bod­ies to join with us.

God may have pur­pose in fel­low­ships that act dif­fer­ently that ours. Let us not get too smug about our own inevitabil­ity that we for­get to share our­selves with those with whom we differ.

There’s a nice remem­brance of George Willoughby by the Brandy­wine Peace Community’s Bob Smith over on the War Resisters Inter­na­tional site. George died a few days ago at the age of 95 [updated]. It’s hard not to remem­ber his favorite quip as he and his wife Lil­lian cel­e­brated their 80th birth­days: “twenty years to go!” Nei­ther of them made it to 100 but they cer­tainly lived fuller lives than the aver­age couple.

I don’t know enough of the details of their lives to write the obit­u­ary (a Wikipedia page was started this morn­ing) but I will say they always seemed to me like the For­rest Gump’s of peace activism–at the cen­ter of every cool peace wit­ness since 1950. You squint to look at the pho­tos at there’s George and Lil, always there. Or maybe pop music would give us the bet­ter anal­ogy: you know how there are entire b-rate bands that carve an entire career around end­lessly rehash­ing a par­tic­u­lar Bea­t­les song? Well, there are whole activist orga­ni­za­tions that are built around par­tic­u­lar cam­paigns that the Willoughby’s cham­pi­oned. Like: in 1958 George was a crew mem­ber of the Golden Rule (pro­filed a bit here), a boat­load of crazy activists who sailed into a Pacific nuclear bomb test to dis­rupt it. Twelve years later some Van­cou­ver activists stage a copy­cat boat sail­ing which became Green­peace. Lil­lian was con­cerned about ris­ing vio­lence against women and started one of the first Take Back the Nightmarches. If you’ve ever sat in an activist meet­ing where everyone’s using con­sen­sus, then you’ve been influ­enced by the Willoughby’s!

For many years I lived deeply embed­ded in com­mu­ni­ties co-founded by the Willough­bys. There’s a recent inter­view with George Lakey about the found­ing of Move­ment for a New Soci­ety that he and they helped cre­ate. In the 1990s I liked to say how I lived “in its ruins,” work­ing at the pub­lish­ing house, liv­ing in a coop house and get­ting my food from the coop that all grew out of MNS. I got to know the Willough­bys through Cen­tral Philadel­phia meet­ing but also as friends. It was a treat to visit their house in Dept­ford, NJ–it adjoined a wildlife sanc­tu­ary they helped pro­tect against the strip-mall sprawl that is the rest of that town. I last saw George a few months ago, and while he had a bit of trou­ble remem­ber­ing who I was, that irre­press­ible smile and spirit were very strong!

I’ve writ­ten before that one of the clos­est modern-day suc­ces­sor to the Move­ment for a New Soci­ety is the so-called New Monas­tic movement–explicitly Chris­t­ian but focused on love and char­ity and often very Quaker’ish. Our cul­ture of sec­u­lar Quak­erism has kept Friends from get­ting involved and shar­ing our decades of expe­ri­ence. Now that Shane Clai­borne is being invited to seem­ingly every lib­eral Quaker venue, maybe it’s a good oppor­tu­nity to look back on our own legacy. Friends like George and Lil­lian helped invent this form.

Just a lit­tle note to every­one that I’ve blogged a cou­ple of posts over on Non​vi​o​lence​.org. They’re both based on “peace mom” Cindy Sheeran’s “res­ig­na­tion” from the peace move­ment yes­ter­day.
It’s all a bit strange to see this from a long-time peace activist per­spec­tive. The move­ment that Sheehan’s talk­ing about and now cri­tiquing is not move­ment I’ve worked with for the last fifteen-plus years. The orga­ni­za­tions I’ve known have all been housed in crum­bling build­ings, with too-old car­pets and fur­ni­ture lifted as often as not from going out of busi­ness sales. Money’s tight and careers poten­tially sac­ri­ficed to help build a world of shar­ing, car­ing and under­stand­ing.
The move­ment Shee­han talks about is fueled by mil­lions of dol­lars of Demo­c­ra­tic Party-related money, with cam­paigns designed to mesh well with Party goals via the so-called “527 groups”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/527_group and other indi­rect mech­a­nisms. Big Media likes to crown these orga­ni­za­tions as _the_ anti­war move­ment, but as Shee­han and Amy Good­man dis­cuss in today’s “Democ­racy Now interview”:http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07%2F05%2F30%2F1343232, cor­po­rate media will end up with much of the tens of mil­lions of dol­lars can­di­dates are now rais­ing. Shee­han makes an impas­sioned plea for peo­ple to sup­port those grass­roots cam­paigns that aren’t sup­ported by the “peace move­ment” but this rein­forces the notion that its the mon­eyed inter­ests that make up the move­ment. I’m sure she knows bet­ter but it’s hard to work for so long and to make so many sac­ri­fices and still be so casu­ally dismissed–not just me but thou­sands of com­mit­ted activists I’ve known over the years.
There are a few peace orga­ni­za­tions in that happy medium between toad­y­ing and poverty (nice car­pets, souls still intact) but it mys­ti­fies me why there isn’t a broader base of sup­port for grass­roots activism. I myself decided to leave pro­fes­sional peace work almost a decade ago after the my Non​vi​o​lence​.org project raised such piti­ful sums. At some point I decided to stop whin­ing about this phe­nom­e­non and just look for better-paying employ­ment else­where but it still fas­ci­nates me from a soci­o­log­i­cal perspective.

Even though my last post was a five minute quickie, it gen­er­ated a num­ber of com­ments. One ques­tion that came up was how aware indi­vid­ual Friends are about the spe­cific Quaker mean­ings of some of the com­mon Eng­lish words we use–“Light,” “Spirit,” etc.(“disambiguation”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation in Wiki-speak). “Mar­shall Massey”:http://journal.earthwitness.org/the-quaker-magpie-journal/ expressed sad­ness that the terms were used uncom­pre­hend­ingly and I sug­gested that some Friends know­ingly con­fuse the generic and spe­cific mean­ings. Mar­shall replied that if this were so it might be a cul­tural dif­fer­ence based on geography.

Con­tinue…

The retreat at the Carmelite Monastery was nice. Here’s some pic­tures, the first of those “long-remembered”:/if_i_dont_make_it_back.php tall stone walls and the rest of the beau­ti­ful chapel:

It was a silent retreat–for us at least. There were three talks about “Teresa of Avila”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_of_Avila given by Father Tim Byer­ley, who also works with the “Col­legium Center”:http://www.collegiumcenter.org/about.php, a kind of reli­gious edu­ca­tion out­reach project for young adult Catholics in South Jer­sey (I men­tioned it “a few months ago”:http://www.quakerranter.org/teaching_quakerism_again.php as a model of young adult youth out­reach that Friends might want to con­sider). Much of what Teresa has to say about prayer is uni­ver­sal and very applic­a­ble to Friends, though I have to admit I started spac­ing out by around the fourth man­sion of the “Inte­rior Castle”:http://www.ccel.org/ccel/teresa/castle2.toc.html (I’ve never been good with num­bered reli­gious steps!).
I’m in no dan­ger of fol­low­ing my wife Julie’s jour­ney from Friends to Catholi­cism, though as always I very much enjoyed being in the midst of a gath­ered group com­mit­ted to a spir­i­tu­al­ity. The idea of reli­gious life as self-abnegation is an impor­tant one for all Chris­tians in an age where “me-ism”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScWdek6_Ids&eurl has become the “sec­u­lar state religion”:http://www.walmart.com/ and I hope to return to it in the near future.

This morn­ing I’m work­ing on the “Pete Seeger”:http://www.quakersong.org/pete_seeger/ sec­tion of Quak​er​song​.org, the web­site of Annie Pater­son and Peter Blood (I’m their web­mas­ter). Parts of their site are amazing–the “Quak­ers and Music”:http://www.quakersong.org/quakers_and_music/ page has become a direc­tory of sorts for all the many Quaker musi­cians out there (who knew there were so many!). But the Pete Seeger is still mostly a col­lec­tion of CDs that Peter & Annie have for sale.
So I was won­der­ing what a good Pete Seeger page might look like and start­ing surf­ing around. There’s a great “fan page”:http://www.peteseeger.net/ which is reg­u­larly updated but has bravely decided to main­tain its orig­i­nal design since it was founded eleven years ago. And “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_seeger does its usual fine job at a biog­ra­phy. But the “gold mine is YouTube”:http://youtube.com/results?search_query=pete+seeger&search=Search.
A year ago a user uploaded three clips from _Rainbow Quest_, a short-lived TV pro­gram Pete put together for a low-wattage UHF sta­tion out of Newark in the mid-60s (it’s now a Tele­mu­ndo affil­i­ate broad­cast­ing recy­cled Mex­i­can soaps for its prime time sched­ule). I don’t know what kind of copy­right issues there are on some­thing like this but it’s great fun to see these old clips. Mak­ing this mate­r­ial widely avail­able is one of the joys of YouTube (well, that and watch­ing “recap­tur­ing the inno­cence of our over-commercialized youth”:http://ofthebest.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-shed-20-years-in-20-seconds.html). I’ll leave you with this, a clip of Pete singing with June Carter and Johnny “I’m soooo stoooned” Cash a few years before they mar­ried.

I had an inter­est­ing oppor­tu­nity last Thurs­day. I skipped work to be talk with two Quak­erism classes at Philadelphia’s “William Penn Char­ter School”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Penn_Charter_School (thanks for the invite Michael and Thomas!). I was asked to talk about Quaker blogs, of all things. Sim­ple, right? Well, on the pre­vi­ous Tues­day I hap­pened upon this pas­sage from Brian Drayton’s new book “On Liv­ing with a Con­cern for Gospel Ministry”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/1–888305-38-x:
bq. I think that your work will have the great­est good effect if you wait to find whether and where the springs of love and divine life con­nect with this open­ing before you appear in the work. This is even true when you have had an invi­ta­tion to come and speak on a topic to a work­shop or some other forum. It is wise to be sus­pi­cious of what is very easy, draws on your prac­ticed strengths and accom­plish­ments, and can be treated as an every­day trans­ac­tion. (p. 149).
Good advice. Of course the role of min­istry is even more com­pli­cated in that I wasn’t address­ing a Quaker audi­ence: like the major­ity of Friends schools, few Penn Char­ter stu­dents actu­ally are Quaker. I’m a “pub­lic school kid”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheltenham_High_School, but it from the out­side it seems like Friends schools stress the ethos of Quak­erism (“here’s Penn Charter’s statement”:http://www.penncharter.com/content/aboutpc/quakerism.asp). Again Dray­ton helped me think beyond nor­mal ideas of pros­el­tyz­ing and out­reach when he talked about “pub­lic meet­ings”: “We are also called, I feel to invite oth­ers to share Christ directly, not pri­mar­ily in order to intro­duce them to Quak­erism and bring them into our meet­ings, but to encour­age them to turn to the light and fol­low it” (p. 147). What I shared with the stu­dents was some of the ways my inter­ac­tion with the Spirit and my faith com­mu­nity shapes my life. When we keep it real, this is a pro­foundly uni­ver­sal­ist and wel­com­ing mes­sage.
I talked about the per­sonal aspect of blog­ging: in my opin­ion we’re at our best when we weave our the­ol­ogy with with per­sonal sto­ries and tes­ti­monies of spe­cific spir­i­tual expe­ri­ences. The stu­dents reminded me that this is also real world les­son: their great­est excite­ment and ques­tion­ing came when we started talk­ing about my father (I used to tell the story of my com­pletely messed-up child­hood fam­ily life a lot but have been out of the habit lately as it’s receded into the past). The stu­dents really wanted to under­stand not just my story but how it’s shaped my Quak­erism and influ­enced my com­ing to Friends. They asked some hard ques­tions and I was stuck hav­ing to give them hard answers (in that they were non-sentimental). When we share of our­selves, we present a wit­ness that can reach out to oth­ers.
Later on, one of the teach­ers pro­jected my blogroll on a screen and asked me about the peo­ple on it. I started telling sto­ries, relat­ing cool blog posts that had stuck out in my mind. Wow: this is a pretty amaz­ing group, with diver­sity of ages and Quak­erism. Review­ing the list really reminded me of the amaz­ing com­mu­nity that’s come together over the last few years.
One inter­est­ing lit­tle snip­pet for the Quaker cul­tural his­to­ri­ans out there: Penn Char­ter was the Gur­neyite school back in the day. When I got Michael’s email I was ini­tially sur­prised they even had classes on Quak­erism as it’s often thought of as one of the least Quaker of the Philadelphia-area Quaker schools. But think­ing on it, it made per­fect sense: the Gur­neyites loved edu­ca­tion; they brought Sun­day School (sorry, _First Day_ School) into Quak­erism, along with Bible study and higher edu­ca­tion. Of course the school that bears their legacy would teach Quak­erism. Inter­est­ingly enough, the his­tor­i­cal Ortho­dox school down the road aways recently approached Penn Char­ter ask­ing about their Quaker classes; in true Wilbu­rite fash­ion, they’ve never both­ered try­ing to teach Quak­erism. The offi­cial Philadel­phia Quaker story is that branches were all fixed up nice and tidy back in 1955 but scratch the sur­face just about any­where and you’ll find Nine­teenth Cen­tury atti­tudes still shap­ing our insti­tu­tional cul­ture. It’s pretty fas­ci­nat­ing really.