Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Yearly Archives ⇒ 2025
KV Tech Tips REVIEWED: A Friend in Deed: The Life of Henry Stanley Newman
March 11, 2025
I very occasionally do a book review for the magazine. My colleague Gail thought I might be interested in this biography of the longest-serving editor of our British counterpart, “The Friend.”
The part of Henry Stanley Newman’s life that I found most fascinating was his generation’s ability to bend technicalities almost to the breaking point in order to maintain formal unity. As a young man, he rebelled against the stodgy and insular Quakerism of his upbringing and found a way to create a parallel spiritual life based on evangelical principles. In middle life, established and respected, he faced challenges from the younger liberals and managed to stay engaged and keep them within the fold. In the United States, these same tendencies toward first evangelical and then liberal theologies both resulted in schisms, many of which still divide Friends here.
Almost twenty years ago I visited a small Midwestern U.S. yearly meeting that really felt like a family, both in its bonds and its dysfunctions. I liked it. One of the most respected members was gay and at some point earlier he was nominated to be the yearly meeting clerk. This was a non-starter for a member church that also affiliated with an Evangelical yearly meeting. After some back and forth he was was approved as an assistant clerk, a solution everyone could live with. Logically it makes absolutely no sense — if gayness precludes one from one yearly meeting position it should for any. But the yearly meeting wanted him and knew he’d be good in leadership and found a way to make it work and he cheerfully accepted the situation. (The situation didn’t last and the dual-affiliated meeting eventually had to make a choice and disaffiliate from one of its yearly meetings.)
There’s an impulse toward purity that woudn’t have allowed these kinds of negotiated compromises. A young Newman, starting Evangelical organizations left and right that were nominally outside of Quaker structure but full of Quakers, would have been disowned. The Midwest yearly meeting would have splintered over an insistence of a clerk status. I certainly understand purity: sometimes we need to make a stand. But sometimes it’s more important to be a logically inconsistent family than to be alone in our correctness. Henry Stanley Newman’s compromises is an interesting model for us, still.
Miracles with Diane Allen
March 11, 2025
About thirty Friends came together at Cropwell Friends on Sunday to hear about miracles from Diane Allen. Allen is well known as a former Philadelphia TV anchor and for long service in the New Jersey State Senate. She is also a Quaker who worships at nearby Mt. Laurel Meeting.
Cropwell hosts Halloween family outreach event again
March 11, 2025
My meeting hosted another Halloween event earlier this week. When we did it in 2022 we arranged to have flyers distributed by the homeowners’ association of development behind us but we missed the October mailing deadline this time. So a few members flyered in the neighborhood and it worked! Someone saw it and shared it on a parent chat for the nearby elementary school. A few further-off people came because of the Facebook event, which frankly surprised me.
The Future of Frieds
March 11, 2025
Craig Barnett on the future of Quakerism in the UK:
There is likely to be an even larger number of people whose most regular engagement with other Quakers is online, perhaps supplemented by retreats, camps or other in-person events. There will almost certainly be a broad range of Quaker activist groups and networks focussed on particular concerns such as the climate emergency, migration and peace. Alongside this, I anticipate a greater diversity of forms of Quaker practice, belonging and spirituality, with most Friends having a much looser connection to area meetings and Britain Yearly Meeting as a whole. In other words it looks much more like a movement than one monolithic organisation.
And Who Are Our Friends?
March 11, 2025
The October Friends Journal is out. A little teaser from my opening column:
Are we all just bad Quakers? I don’t think so. I had so many conversations with Friends over the years in which they judged themselves against semi-mythical “real Quakers.” I suspect we often find our greatest Quaker authenticity in the messiness that follows faithfulness. Some of the most fascinating Friends in the past, figures such as Benjamin Lay and Public Universal Friend, were so far ahead of their time that they couldn’t fit into the Quaker mainstream of their day.
The Good Samaritan who stopped to help a wounded traveler was probably made late for whatever appointment he was rushing to. He might have lost business with his detour; he certainly lost money on the supplies he used to treat the wounds and on the money he gave the innkeeper. But he was clear-sighted enough to know that the inward commandment to help his neighbor was more important than any of these worldly concerns.
Donald W McCormick: Relationships in Quaker Meeting
March 11, 2025
Last week I spoke with Friends Journal author Don McCormick. Don’t been a prolific writer for us in recent years. We talked of our experiences of community among modern Friends, especially in different types of meetings, as well as techniques for orienting and welcoming newcomers to Quaker meetings.
Nancy Bieber loves her Friends meeting
March 11, 2025
Nancy has an article in the current issue of Friends Journal called “A Love Letter to My Meeting.” With a title like that, it could be overly sappy but I found it tender and deep, a reflection on her changing roles and relationships.
In the video interview we talk about navigating controversies – a fight over carpets in the past and struggling with wildly divergent attitudes around COVID policies more recently. I was most interested in how she’s changed over the years. How do you go from a newcomer still trying to understand Quaker lingo to a pillar of the meeting, the kind of person who steps in when something needs to be handled. The short answer is that this happens over time.