I was on a video call when Stacy’s first call came in so I had to let it go to voicemail. So also have voicemail set up. After my previous call ended I was able to reply to Stacy’s email and then followup with a quick call to confirm details. This was one less detail she had to worry about in an event with lots of moving parts. (In addition to a half dozen Truitt family members we had the mayor, deputy mayor, township manager, a police liaison, and a communications staffer with a camera. That’s a lot of people to coordinate.) In a lull in the event, Stacy told me it was great that she find and reach someone at Cropwell Meeting so easily.

I know communication can be hard but we need to be accessible. I’ve been ghosted SO MANY TIMES when trying to call or email Quaker meetings. And it’s not just the small ones that don’t get back to me. Sometimes meetings with paid office staff also don’t return messages. Cropwell uses a Google Voice number to forward phone calls to my personal cell and emails also automatically forward to me. It’s not overwhelming, not in the least—I let things forward to voicemail when I need to and I have ringers turned off at night. But because Cropwell set this up even before I became involved, I’ve been able to respond to inquiries quickly, once even as I was driving to meeting on Sunday morning (don’t worry, I pulled over). People already think we’re extinct. Don’t give them more reasons to think that’s true.

Now we have “uni-context,” the idea that our online social lives bleed into all of our different networks (think: friends, work colleagues, romantic interests) so much that the networks have been flattened; the “context” has “collapsed” (there’s a whole Wikipedia post on this). The refinement of this idea into “uni-context” comes from Agnes Callard, a UChicago prof. Where once we could show different faces to different audiences, now everyone sees all.

First off, I’m not sure I really buy it from a cultural tech perspective. The original Facebook ideal of wide social graphs and public accounts feels like a dinosaur. I picked up this article from Jason Kottke, who notes that “blogs have global context.” Twenty years ago, yes, many of us were living very public online lives—or at least made an image of ourselves that was very accessible on blogs and in networks like the OG image-sharing network Flickr, which defaulted to public access.

I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Gen Z is mostly absent from public spaces like Facebook and usually keeps pretty locked-down accounts. The app that has come to define the 2020s is TikTok (and its clones), which is a highly performative space where most of us consume, not create. I had a great after-meeting talk with two younger Quakers this weekend about outreach. Most of their discussions happen on various Discords, networks so private you generally can’t even find out about particular “server” except through word of mouth. When I asked them how interested seekers were supposed to find local Friends if everything was locked down on private networks, one of them suggested there should be an email list. I’m glad I wasn’t drinking any coffee at that moment because I would have had a real-life spit take. My first Quaker organizing thirty years ago was putting together an email contact list first for YAFs in my area and then worldwide because I didn’t see anyone else doing it. Back then local YAF networks were invisible to outsiders because the web as we know it barely existed. One could argue that GenZ has reinvented the privacy but also invisibility of the 1990s.

But granting the “uni-context” conceit for argument, this is a big post of Quaker plainness. Yes there were mostly unwritten rules but if you open up an old copy of one of the *Books of Discipline* and turn to the plainness section, you’ll find that it focuses on intention. My favorite query asks if you dress in a way “calculated to please a vain and wanton mind.”

It is the Quaker concept of *intregrity* at play. Going back to root meanings, something that is integral cannot be broken into pieces without losing its identity. We should act and present ourselves in the same way in all context. Who we are should be who we are, whether at work, play, church, etc. Similarly our *yeas* should be *yeas* and our *nays* *nays* in all context so that we don’t need a special incantation of swearing to tell the absolute truth.

Of course our lives are complex. I’m a runner and I put on running gear when I go out, especially in the August heat. But I’m not doing that for a calculated reason but a practical one. And I often have a pre-run running shirt on when I log into a work Zoom call.

Anyway it’s sort of sad that so many Friends have consigned old Quaker practices to the dust heap. The ethics, if not the details, might be something philosophers are seeking today.

A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird

Once you learn what the “uni-context” is, you won’t stop seeing it everywhere

www.derekthompson.org

The new issue of Friends Journal is up. I wrote the Among Friends intro this month, waxing lyrically on the “sonic landscape” of my meeting in August:

The sounds of our August silence are far from pure. Although the calls of red-shouldered hawks can be a bit harsh, hearing them reminds me that a family shares the trees of our burial ground. The crunch of the gravel in the driveway reassures me that one of our perpetual late-comers is about to join our fellowship. Not all the sounds are natural, of course. Once or twice in the hour someone will redline a motorcycle on the street outside, the whiny revs and gear changes drifting over to bounce inside our worship space. I usually try to tune out this sound, but sometimes I smile instead, knowing that someone is having fun on a hot summer day. I say a little prayer for their safety and wish them well.

I’ve also recorded a new episode of my author video podcast with John Helding, who wrote How Can I Keep from Singing? The Marvelous Mystery of Worship-Fluid Meetings. He tells a great story of going from a very died-in-the wool unprogrammed meeting to Lopez Island Worship Group (now full Quaker meeting) that scheduled monthly singing worship and worship sharing. I think I’m always going to prefer the model of sitting down quietly and waiting for the Holy Spirit but I do appreciate that it’s hard to build up a meeting culture that invites ministry. I’m happy that the worship sharing at Lopez Island helped uncork nascent ministry in the standard, open worship.

As I wrote a few years ago, I think ministry should be an expected miracle and not have quite so high a bar that people are intimidated from speaking. It takes practice to know when ministry is Spirit-led and maybe part of that practice is not always getting it right. I know some meetings face the opposite problem: ministry that is perhaps too frequent and too headstrong and inappropriate. But a Friends Meeting is a bit like a choir in that it is always needing creative renegotiation to find the sweet harmony. We are a chosen family that just shows up every week, with people experienced and new working and learning how to hold the body together.

I encourage Friends to please remember that Generative AI art is produced unethically from AI models that scrape the work of real artists without consent or compensation. In the last few weeks, I have encountered two instances of Quakers using Generative AI as a part of their Outreach. This is deeply disturbing to me. There is no legitimate reason to use Generative AI Art. You can use open source images, you can hire artists, or you can make your own art. Or, use no art at all. Better that than to steal from artists and display art you hand no hand in making.

My Facebook feed is awash in terrible AI art accompanied by terrible AI-written feel-good stories, shared as much by Quakers as by any other demographic (my bad for still being on there, perhaps).

Quakerism is a spirituality that requires active participation. You can’t just nod off in the back (well, you can but you shouldn’t). Quaker communities have been lived experiences. As someone who works daily with writers, it’s stunning just how much AI has become a crutch for people. There are some very active writers in Quaker online spaces whose work is mostly AI. Is it for the social boost that comes from being ubiquitous?

A weird tangent but hear me out: if you read a lot of classic Quaker journals, there’s frequently stories from their teens in which the author consciously wrestles with plain dress. They talk about the lost friendships that came when they adopted a more uniform style and also about how hard it is to discern and navigate the inevitable voice of pride inside themselves (look at me, I’m plain!) with their legitimate wish and leading to be of use to the fellowship. That process of wrestling with ego is something that never ends for any of us, but especially not one of these ministers. Knowing when ministry is Spirit-led or ego-fed is a core competency for this work. In the end, the dress didn’t matter so much. But the “baby steps” of worrying about it was an early workout of those discernment muscles.

When we turn to AI we stop working those muscles and offload so much to the machine. Skipping the baby steps means we’re not necessarily going to be as practiced when important decisions need to be made. Let’s put out bad art if it means we’ll start learning how to put out more authentic art as we develop.

World War II presented a severe challenge for American colleges. But perhaps no group faced a more difficult dilemma than the institutions of higher education founded by Quakers. How could they reconcile a centuries-old witness to peace with the need to survive?

I didn’t know much of this history and never thought about the existential threats to higher education in the 1940s when campuses were largely emptied of their male students.

Quaker colleges in the USA during World War II

Political and cultural observations in light of Quaker discipleship.

blog.canyoubelieve.me

As one historian wrote:

The frontier did collapse in late 1763. The surprise was that the armed mob that descended from the frontier into Lancaster — and then to Philadelphia in 1764 — were White frontiersmen. Everybody had expected it would be Indians.

Even more tragically, a few of the people who escaped the mobs ended up being slaughtered in later attacks. Much of the colonial government wasn’t Quaker in the latter half of the century, including some of William Penn’s descendants. Still, Friends today can wonder whether the high-minded promises of eternal friendship between Quakers and Indigenous Peoples were more hollow and aspirational than we’d like to admit. (Of course most of the Lenape and Susquehannock died from European-imported diseases, with every boatload of settlers bringing more death to the original inhabitants.)

The ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ Lost: A Friendship Found  — ICT

The Conestoga massacres in Pennsylvania more than 250 years ago forever changed Native-White relations

ICT

I suppose that in either case, Christian or Quaker, the prevailing assumption was that these books are for internal use among Friends. This is who we are, more or less. But what I like about the title Christian Faith and Practice is another interpretation entirely, one I have no permission or evidence to propose: this way of faith and life is not just for us; it’s recommended for all Christians.

I’d argue a strong yes to this. When I think about what ancient Quaker oddities might still be relevant, one of the questions I ask myself is whether we could argue that the whole church should also adopt the practice (however unlikely that might be in reality). If it’s just some Quaker canard, we can toss it into an antiquity dustbin. But if all Christians should be following the practice, then let’s set the example.

I like Thomas Clarkson’s historical account of Friends particularly because he’s not writing for a Quaker audience. I get the feeling he’s holding our practices up for scrutiny, as if to say that maybe everyone should be following them and indeed, his pacifism and abolitionism were greatly influenced by the Friends he met in his work.

Of course this witness to other Christians sort of falls apart if we don’t consider ourselves Christian. If online discourse is any indication, there are large numbers of Quakers who are rather oblivious that almost all of our Quaker identity has a biblical basis (selective, of course, and also interpreted, debated and changing). Quakerism is seen as something that just randomly popped up in the world. None of the early Friends would have thought that.

Whose faith? Whose practice? (part one)

Political and cultural observations in light of Quaker discipleship.

blog.canyoubelieve.me