Comments on: Beyond the MacGuffins: Sheeran’s Beyond Majority Rule

By: Martin Kelley

Martin Kelley — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:33:16 +0000

In reply to Melynda Huskey. Kind of fun to re-read this comment 23 years or so later, now that I've been Friends Journal editor for over a decade. I wonder what Melynda would think of FJ in 2026.

By: Francis Drake

Francis Drake — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 08:49:24 +0000

I’ve no idea if you take any note of comments to old posts (I became aware of this thread only yesterday [Dec 10 ’06] courtesy of http://gnoscast.blogspot.com/) but assuming you do…
fwiw, I’m the newest recorded member of Tampa (FL) Friends. While still an attender someone put Sheeran’s book in my hand, and just reading on my own, the passages you cite jumped out at me in exactly the same way.
Another citation that has stayed with me comes a few pages back:
… One evening, the writer was sharing supper with two friends in their late seventies. He mentioned he was curious how Friends understood God. One of his companions paused and remarked: “Well now, I guess I don’t really know. I know what I think.” Then, turning to his comrade, he said: “Thee and I have been worshiping together for almost fifty years. I don’t know what thee thinks about God. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it.” The other grave Friend agreed, adding: “I really don’t think it matters much, either. If thee shares the experience in the worship, it doesn’t much matter how thee puts it into words.”
Or, as Angelus Silesius would say,
God whose love and joy are everywhere
can’t come to visit
unless you aren’t there.
Go well.

By: Martin Kelley

Martin Kelley — Mon, 05 Jan 2004 18:12:49 +0000

Dear Melynda, I'm a bit surprised how many people are relating to these "rants." I have to wonder if there's a critical mass to turn this all into a group publication at some point... As you might have seen if you had digged down to my resume, I worked for Friends Journal for almost two years recently, very part-time, as webmaster. I like the Journal staff but certainly understand and share many of your frustrations. A good bit of the content is made up of lifestyle articles for a certain kind of reader--over fifty, a half-committed liberal with a self-focused generic spirituality. They did a big survey or readers a few years ago and that's their target reader. It's a chicken/egg conundrum of course and I wish they'd do more to court a wider range of readers. Much of the content would be equally at home in a general interest magazine like Utne Reader. I find there's usually about one good article an issue and this is what I always look for. Interesting, many of the references that Thomas Hamm's "Quakers in America" uses for FGC Friends come from Friends Journal articles. His footnotes are sort of a "best of" collection from the past ten years and as soon as I've finished the book I'm going to have to go over to the FJ office and photocopy all of Hamm's references. One of the things I plan to talk about when I review his book are the footnotes, since I find his choices quite interesting. If you're looking to reallocate a limited magazine budget, you might take a look at Quaker Life. I've been regularly surprised and challenged by it since Trish Edwards-Konic became editor. It has its own frustrations (they've made an editorial decision to keep all the articles short) but they draw from a much wider swath of Quakerism and have less lifestyle articles per issue. Then there's always the web. I'm not sure why there's such a mystique to print but I know many Friends who were more impressed to see my name printed in ten-point type on the FJ masthead than they were with my own Nonviolence.org, which reaches an audience five to ten times larger than the Journal's... I wonder if there might be a larger phenomenon underway, in which old-media companies agressively court their aging audiences so much that younger audiences turn to the internet instead. This is certainly happening in the music industry, where the publishing companies have given up younger listeners to MP3s and online services, and thrown the marketing money into new albums by aging rock stars aimed at baby-boomers.

By: Melynda Huskey

Melynda Huskey — Mon, 05 Jan 2004 13:22:32 +0000

I've enjoyed your work for several months--largely because we share some of the same exasperations and affections for our Quaker faith. But since we're all Ranters now, I'd like to do a little ranting about what the latest issue of *Friends Journal* seems to say about the state of Quakerdom. My partner wishes we'd stop subscribing to *FJ,* since every issue sets me off. But the latest (geese on the cover) was just about more than I could bear. Was it the letter from the meditation circle which likes to call one meditation time a month "Quaker Meeting," but which elects not to be "burdened" by any of the Quaker testimonies? How about the long essay on the unQuakerliness of saying mean things about President Bush, which adduced as reasons that equality is a Quaker testimony, and rich people are just as equal as poor people--and let's not forget that a childhood of wealth and privilege can be just as hard on a person as poverty; and anyway, a president who tried to govern based on Quaker principles would be a noble failure, since those crazy ideas could never work in the real world! Or maybe it was just the general whiff of the tomb--a really old tomb, all scent of decay long gone, and nothing left but dust and dead air. No Quakers here, pal. No George Fox rebuking priests from the narthex aisle. No Isaac Pennington seizing the moment of the Restoration to make Quakers as unpopular with the King and Court as they had been with the Protector and the Commonwealth. No Mary Dyer ready to swing off the gallows and into Glory for the sake of Light. Not even an Elizabeth Fry down in the dungeons. Just a bunch of skeletons in bulky Andean handknits and Birkenstocks, a dry wind whistling round their bones, as if they were moaning softly, "Imagine there's no Heaven . . . Imagine no possessions . . . All we are saying . . . Ah, those were the bright days of hope."