Category Archives ⇒ Quaker

As the blog name implies, I am a mem­ber of the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends, known col­lo­qui­al­ly as Quak­ers. Many of my blog posts deal with issues of our soci­ety and its inter­ac­tions with the larg­er world. I gen­er­al­ly only include my own posts in this list. I share many many Quak­er links in my Links Blog cat­e­go­ry and on Quak­erQuak­er.

Impor­tant Posts:
The Lost Quak­er Gen­er­a­tion (2003)
Peace and Twenty-Somethings (2003)
We’re All Ranters Now (2003)
Pass­ing the Faith, Plan­et of the Quak­er Style (2004)
Quak­er Tes­ti­monies (2004)
Hey, Who Am I To Decide Any­thing? (2007)
The Biggest Most Vibran­ty Most Out­reachi­est Pro­gram Ever (2010)
Get­ting a Horse to Drink (on Philadel­phia YM) (2010)
Tell Them All This But Don’t Expect Them to Lis­ten (2010)

What is this QuakerQuaker thing?

March 29, 2006
· Martin Kelley

There’s been some head-scratching going on about Quak­erQuak­er over the last few weeks. In the ser­vice of trans­paren­cy I’ve post­ed my con­trib­u­tor guide­lines on the “About Quak­erQuak­er page”. Here they are:

Post should be explic­it­ly Quak­er: Any thought­ful posts from any branch of Friends that wres­tles in some way with what it means to be a Quak­er is fair game. While we all have our own issues that con­nect deeply with our under­stand­ing of our faith, the Blog­watch only seems to work if it keeps focused on Quak­erism, on how we our faith and lives inter­act. Back when this was just a links list on my per­son­al site I would get com­plaints when I added some­thing that seemed relat­ed to my under­stand­ing of Quak­erism but that was­n’t specif­i­cal­ly writ­ten from a Quak­er stand­point (when we want to make this kind of link we should do so on our per­son­al blogs where we can put it in bet­ter context).

Post should be time­ly: I’ve billed Quak­erQuak­er as “a guide to the Quak­er con­ver­sa­tion” and links should go to recently-written arti­cles with strong voic­es. We’re not try­ing to cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive list of Quak­er web­sites, so no link­ing to orga­ni­za­tion­al home­pages. While most links should go to blog posts, it’s fine to include good arti­cles from Quak­er pub­li­ca­tions. A link to some­thing like a press release or new book announce­ment should only be made if it’s extra­or­di­nary. Remem­ber that Quak­erQuak­er posts will only appear on the main site for a few days (if the ini­tial set­up goes well I can start work on some ideas to giave a more time­less ele­ment to the site).

Post should be Inter­est­ing: Don’t book­mark every­thing you find. If the post feels pre­dictable or snoozy, just ignore it (even if the writer or top­ic is impor­tant). The Quak­er blog­gers all have their audi­ences and we don’t need to high­light every post of every blog­ger. Only make the link if the post speaks out to you in some way (it’s quite pos­si­ble that one of the oth­er con­trib­u­tors will pick up, find­ing some­thing you didn’t and high­light­ing it in their descrip­tion). That said, the posts you link to don’t have to be mas­ter­pieces; they can have gram­mat­i­cal and log­i­cal mis­takes. What’s impor­tant is that there’s some idea in there that’s inter­est­ing. It might be a good dis­ci­pline for each of us not to add our the posts from our own per­son­al blogs but to let one of the oth­er con­trib­u­tors do it for us.

That’s it. While there are some vague assump­tions in all this about the role of tra­di­tion and com­mu­ni­ty, dis­ci­pline and indi­vid­u­al­ism, there’s noth­ing about the­ol­o­gy or who gets linked. This is a pub­li­ca­tion, with some­thing of an edi­to­r­i­al voice in that I’ve cho­sen who gets to add links and asked them to be sub­jec­tive, but its very mel­low and I’ve been hap­py to see con­trib­u­tors range far afield. Google tells us that this is one of 18.7 mil­lion “Quak­er” web­sites and $10/month will get you your own so let’s not do too much navel-gazing about what’s linked or not linked. If you don’t find it inter­est­ing, there are plen­ty of non-subjective Quak­er blogs lists out there. I do lis­ten to feed­back and am always twid­dling with the site so feel free to send email to me at mar​tinkel​ley​.com/​c​o​n​t​act.

Love is unconditional and accepts us for who we are

March 15, 2006
· Martin Kelley

I tried to post this as a com­ment on “this piece by James Riemermann”:http://feeds.quakerquaker.org/quaker?m=299 on the Non­the­ist Friends web­site but the site expe­ri­enced a tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ty when I tried to sub­mit it (hope it’s back up soon!). James describes his post as a “rant” about “conservative-leaning lib­er­al Friends,” and one theme that got picked up in the com­ments was how he and oth­ers felt exclud­ed by us (for that is a term I use to try to describe my spir­i­tu­al con­di­tion). Rather than loose the com­ment I’ll just post it here.
Hi James and everyone,
Well, I think I was one of the first of the Quak­er blog­gers to talk about conservative-leaning lib­er­al Quak­ers back in July 2003. I too am not sure it’s any­thing worth call­ing a “move­ment.”
I hear this feel­ing of being exclud­ed but I’m not sure where that’s com­ing from. When James had a real­ly won­der­ful, thought-provoking response to my “We’re All Ranters Now” piece, I asked him if I could “reprint” the com­ment as its own guest piece. It got a lot of atten­tion, a lot of com­ments. I did­n’t real­ize you were using non​the​ist​friends​.org as a blog these days but “Robin M”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/contributors_robin_m/ of “What Canst Thou Say”:http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/ did and has added a link to your post from “QuakerQuaker.org”:www.quakerquaker.org, which again is a val­i­da­tion that yours is an impor­tant voice (I can pret­ty much guar­an­tee that this is going to be one of the more fol­lowed links). You and every­one here are part of the family.
Yes, we have some dis­agree­ments. I don’t think Quak­erism is sim­ply made up of who­ev­er makes it into the meet­ing­house. I think we have a tra­di­tion that we’ve inher­it­ed. This con­sists of prac­tices and val­ues and ways of look­ing at the world. Much of that tra­di­tion comes from the gospel of Jesus and the epis­tles between the ear­li­est Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. Much of what might feel like neu­tral Quak­er prac­tice is a clear echo of that tra­di­tion, and that echo is what I talk about that in my blogs. I think it’s good to know where we’re com­ing from. That does­n’t mean we’re stuck there and we adapt it as our rev­e­la­tion changes (this atti­tude is why I’m a lib­er­al Friend no mat­ter how much I talk about Christ). These blog con­ver­sa­tions are the ways we share our expe­ri­ences, min­is­ter to and com­fort one another.
That peo­ple hold dif­fer­ent reli­gious under­stand­ings and prac­tices isn’t in itself inher­ent­ly exclu­sion­ary. Diver­si­ty is good for us, right? There’s no one Quak­er cen­ter. There’s muli­ti­ple con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen­ing in mul­ti­ple lan­guages, much of it glo­ri­ous­ly over­lap­ping on the elec­tron­ic path­ways of the inter­net. That’s won­der­ful, it shows a great vital­i­ty. The reli­gious tra­di­tion that is Quak­erism is not dead, not moth­balled away in a liv­ing his­to­ry muse­um some­where. It’s alive, with its assump­tions and bound­aries con­stant­ly being revis­it­ed. That’s cool. If a par­tic­u­lar post feels too carp­ing, there’s always the “elder­ing of the back but­ton,” as I like to call it. Let’s try to hear each oth­er from where we are and to remain open to the min­istry from those who might appear to be com­ing from a dif­fer­ent place. Love is the first move­ment and love is uncon­di­tion­al and accepts us for who we are.
I bet­ter stop this before I get too mushy, with all this talk of love! See what I mean about being a lib­er­al Quaker?
Your Friend, Martin

A time of sadness and prayer

March 11, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Sad news com­ing over the inter­net: after 100 days of cap­tiv­i­ty, Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er Tom Fox was found dead yes­ter­day in Iraq, the sta­tus of his three com­pan­ions unknown.

The Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er Teams issued an ele­gant and heart­felt state­ment begin­ning “In grief we trem­ble before God who wraps us with com­pas­sion.” Fox knew the risk he was tak­ing going to Iraq unarmed. But he also knew that this wit­ness  would mean more to the Iraqi peo­ple than a hun­dred tanks. He knew the war we Friends wage is the Lam­b’s War, a war won not through strength but through meek­ness, our only weapon our humilty before God and our love of neigh­bor. My prayers are with his fam­i­ly and friends, may Christ’s com­fort con­tin­ue to hold them through these aching times.
More his­to­ry and resources on my “Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er Team Watch”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/christian_peacemaker_teams/

Deepening the intervisitation of Gathering

March 2, 2006
· Martin Kelley

The pro­gram for this year’s FGC Gath­er­ing of Friends went online at mid­night yes­ter­day – I stayed up late to flip the switch­es to make it live right as Third Month start­ed – right on sched­ule. By 12:10am EST four vis­i­tors had already come to the site! There’s a lot of inter­est in the Gath­er­ing, the first one on the West Coast.

Stu­dents of late-20th Cen­tu­ry Quak­er his­to­ry can see the pro­gres­sion of Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence from a very Philadelphia-centric, provin­cial body that had its annu­al gath­er­ing at a South Jer­sey beach town to one that real­ly does try to serve Friends across the coun­try. There’s loss­es in the changes (alum­ni of the Cape May Gath­er­ings all speak of them with misty eyes) but over­all it’s been a need­ed shift in focus. In recent years, a dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of Gath­er­ing work­shop lead­ers have come from the “inde­pen­dent” unaf­fil­i­at­ed year­ly meet­ings of the West. It’s nice.

Joe G has been send­ing me emails about his selec­tion process (it’s almost real-time as he weighs each one!). It’s help­ful as it saves me the trou­ble of sort­ing through them. It’s usu­al­ly tough to find a work­shop I want to take. A lot of Friends I real­ly respect have told me they’ve stopped going to the Gath­er­ing after awhile because it just does­n’t feed them.

It’s a shame when these Friends stop com­ing. The Gath­er­ing is one of the most excit­ing annu­al coming-together of Quak­ers in North Amer­i­ca. It’s very impor­tant for new and/or iso­lat­ed Friends and it helps pull all its atten­ders into a wider Fel­low­ship. Inter­vis­i­ta­tion has always been one of the most impor­tant tools for knit­ting togeth­er Friends and the Gath­er­ing has been fill­ing much of that need for lib­er­al Friends for the last hun­dred years.

I’ve been hav­ing this sense that Gath­er­ing needs some­thing more. I don’t know what that some­thing is, only that I long to con­nect more with oth­er Friends. My best con­ver­sa­tions have invari­ably tak­en place when I stopped to talk with some­one while run­ning across cam­pus late to some event. These Oppor­tu­ni­ties have been pre­cious but they’re always so fran­tic. The Trav­el­ing Min­istries Pro­gram often has a won­der­ful evening inter­est group but by the time we’ve gone around shar­ing our names, sto­ries and con­di­tions, it’s time to break. I’m not look­ing for a new pro­gram (don’t wor­ry Liz P!, wait it’s not you who has to wor­ry!), just a way to have more con­ver­sa­tions with the Quak­erQuak­er Con­ver­gent Friends – which in this con­text I think boils down to those with some­thing of a call to min­istry and an inter­est in Quak­er vision & renew­al. Let’s all find a way of con­nect­ing more this year, yes?

For those inter­est­ed I’ve signed up for these work­shops: Blessed Com­mu­ni­ty in James’ Epis­tle (led by Max Hansen of Berke­ley Friends Church, Deep­en­ing the Silence, Invit­ing Vital Min­istry (20), and Find­ing Our­selves in the Bible).

Related Entries Elsewhere:

Giuseppe Beppe: Il podcast della famiglia

February 24, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Sor­ry for the qui­et on the blog front. I’ve been busy, busy. My Sec­ond Month has seen an FGC com­mit­tee meet­ing in Greens­boro, the “Food for Fire” Pow­ell House week­end and a dead­line for the Gath­er­ing Advance Pro­gram. I’m sure I’ll be more talk­a­tive soon, promise promise.

In the mean­time, I’m online in anoth­er realm. Mia Con­siglieri Joe G inter­viewed me for Beppe­pod­cast #24: “Mar­tin Kel­ley, Quak­er Blog Father”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/beppepodcast-24-martin-kelley-quaker.html (“sub­scrip­tion here”:http://beppe.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=62209). Molto buon, il mio figlio. Bel­lo! Bello!

Quak​erQuak​er​.org, new home to the blog watch

January 3, 2006
· Martin Kelley

I’ve moved the Quak­er Blog Watch mate­r­i­al to a new web­site, Quak​erQuak​er​.org. It’s more-or-less the same mate­r­i­al with more-or-less the same design but the project has become pop­u­lar enough that it seems like a good time to send it off on its own. I hope to find ways of mak­ing it more col­lab­o­ra­tive in the near-future.

You can sub­scribe to the Quak­erQuak­er Watch via Blog­lines or to the dai­ly email by fol­low­ing the links. If you’re already fol­low­ing the Watch in a sub­scrip­tion read­er, you should change the source of the feed to http://​feeds​.quak​erquak​er​.org/​q​u​a​ker if you don’t want to miss out on any future inno­va­tions. If you have the Watch cur­rent­ly list­ed in your blog’s side­bar you won’t have to change anything.

At some point when the dust of the move has set­tled (and I have the new Quak​erfind​er​.org launched as part of my FGC work), I’ll take a moment to wax philo­soph­i­cal about the evo­lu­tion of this project and will toss out a few ideas about where it might go in the future. In the mean­time, let me know if any­thing is bro­ken, con­fused or gram­mat­i­cal­ly mangled.
A kind of ret­ro­spec­tive his­to­ry of the project is avail­able on the “quak­erquak­er thread”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/quakerquaker/ of the Ranter.

“Food for Fire” workshop at Powell House

December 27, 2005
· Martin Kelley

In ear­ly Feb­ru­ary I’m lead­ing a young adult work­shop up at New York Year­ly Meet­ing’sPow­ell House. I don’t have any desire to get into the “spir­i­tu­al work­shop cir­cuit,” but I was asked and it seemed like an oppor­tu­ni­ty to gath­er some inter­est­ing folks to talk about what we hunger for. The work­shop is called “Food for Fire: Break­ing into the Pow­er of Quak­erism” (already regret­ting the “break­ing in” metaphor – should­n’t it be “bro­ken in by?”).

I hope that some of the extend­ed Quak­er Ranter fam­i­ly will be able to make it out. This could be a kind of Mid-Atlantic/New Eng­land gath­er­ing of what­ev­er this of infor­mal movement/network is. Because this is a work­shop mod­el I am expect­ed to impart knowl­edge but while I’ll come with an worked-out agen­da, I’m hap­py to loosen and/or toss it aside if need­ed. The work­shop description:

Many of the clas­sic themes of Quak­erism speak to the con­di­tion of a world wracked by con­sumerism, war, big­otry and envi­ron­men­tal dis­re­gard. Friends have a his­to­ry of unit­ing truth and love and turn­ing it into action. We’ll reach into the Quak­er attic to dust off gospel order, plain liv­ing, trav­el­ing min­istry, prophet­ic wit­ness; we’ll try them on and see how they fit into our expe­ri­ences of the liv­ing Spir­it. There will be plen­ty of time to share sto­ries in small groups and togeth­er. How are our month­ly meet­ings doing rec­og­niz­ing the gifts of min­istry and ser­vice among younger Friends? How are Friends doing spread­ing the good news of the Quak­er way? There is a great peo­ple to be gath­ered still but how can we enter into the faith­ful­ness required? Jesus came up the fish­er­men and said “Come, fol­low me;” what would we do if we got that call? Like any pro­grammed Quak­er event the work­shop is real­ly an excuse to assem­ble Friends togeth­er in prayer and faith­ful­ness to God. The most impor­tant thing we could do this week­end is build friend­ships: friend­ships of sup­port, mutu­al account­abil­i­ty, and peer men­tor­ship. Friends from all branch­es of Quak­erism wel­come, as are the newest of seekers.

The price is $180 for the week­end but if that’s a bur­den then try to get your meet­ing to pay – I sus­pect they’ll be hap­py to see that you’re show­ing an inter­est in Quak­erism. I’ll be dri­ving up from South Jer­sey and will prob­a­bly be able to pick up folks from Philly & New York. Email me if you have or need a ride from oth­er points and I’ll try to con­nect you with oth­er travelers.

If you’re too old or too impa­tient to wait for Sec­ond Month to roll around, pick up Bri­an Dray­ton’s new book On Liv­ing with a Con­cern for Gospel Min­istry and read that instead. Yes, I plugged it five days ago and yes, my pay­check comes from the pub­lish­er – but I’ve now now read the first chap­ter and it real­ly is that good. Read­ing it feels like putting that soon-to-be-favorite pop album on the turntable for the first time. Where were you when you first heard Sgt Pep­pers? (for the YAFs in the audi­ence: yes I’m being sil­ly with the Bea­t­les ref­er­ence; if you remem­ber first putting that album on a turntable in 1967 then this isn’t your workshop!).

Confusing “Quaker Faith” for God and worshipping ourselves

November 9, 2005
· Martin Kelley

Some­times my Quak­er Ranter posts dry up for awhile. I con­sole myself that I’m doing enough giv­ing out the “dai­ly read­ing list of Quak­er posts”:/quaker, read­ing through my new old Quak­er book col­lec­tion (Samuel Bow­nas just vis­it­ed the “meet­ing I’m attend­ing most fre­quent­ly these days”:http://www.pym.org/pym_mms/middletownpa_cdq.php!) and work­ing my new “advance­ment and out­reach “:www​.FGC​quak​er​.org/ao job – oh, and of course there’s also “the family”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_kelley/40269563/! But you could also just fol­low my train of thought by look­ing over my shoul­der at com­ments made at oth­er sites. Over the last few days the Quak­er blo­gos­phere has had a num­ber of inter­est­ing posts. Here’s a cobble-together of posts and com­ments that have spo­ken to me about the inher­ent Quak­er snare of con­fus­ing our “Quak­er faith” for God.
Over on Kwak­er­saur, David M “shares some renew­al queries for his year­ly meeting”:http://kwakersaur.blogspot.com/2005/11/consultation-and-renewal.html. “Nan­cy A”:http://nancysapology.blogspot.com detect­ed a “sense an over­all fatigue” in them and “Beppe”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/ agreed, ask­ing if the seemingly-simple answers to these sorts of queries require that we first have the much harder-to-come-by “under­stand­ing [of] who we are.”
One of the queries goes “What does our Quak­er faith ask us to DO?” _Eeeyyaa-aa-yaaaaawwwn_. My favorite Quak­er committee-meeting trick of late con­sists of replace all the “we”-like phras­es with _God_. How about “What does God ask us to DO?” (Just a quick tes­ti­mo­ny: I love David’s work and I val­ue his won­der­ful online min­istry. Any time he wants to come down to Philly to tend to our flock with talk of Quak­er renew­al, he’s wel­come!! I’m sure every­one on the Con­sul­ta­tion and Renew­al Work­ing Group is deep­er than the queries would indi­cate and sus­pect that this is an exam­ple of the Quak­er cor­po­rate dumbing-down ten­den­cy that’s prac­ti­cal­ly our modus operandi.)
All this ties into a great post from AJ Schwanz, “Can I Say I’m Emerg­ing If I Haven’t Emerged or Quak­er If I Haven’t Quaked?”:http://ajschwanz.com/index.php/2005/11/07/can-i-say-im-emerging-if-i-havent-emerged-or-quaker-if-i-havent-quaked/,. Here’s a taste:
bq. Part of me has thought of shed­ding my Quak­er pin. How can I use it?: have I ever quaked with the pow­er of God? Shed­ding my dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion label cer­tain­ly would sup­port the idea that “there’s real­ly only one church, but lots of meet­ing places.” Par­tic­u­lar­ly in this town where the Quak­er col­lege is per­ceived as pret­ty insu­lar, would I have dif­fer­ent inter­ac­tions with folks if I sim­ply said “I’m a fol­low­er of Christ” rather than a “Friend”? What would I miss out on? What would be gained?
Paul L implic­it­ly address­es the ques­tion of shed­ding the Quak­er pin in his “review of Pun­shon­’s Rea­sons for Hope”:http://showerofblessings.blogspot.com/2005/11/reasons-for-hope.html, where he asks if “Quak­ers have a unique niche to fill in the Chris­t­ian and broad­er social landscape.”
Are we Quak­er because it’s com­fort­able, because our friends are, because the build­ings are cool and the social hour cof­fee hot? Or the oppo­site: are we Friends because we real­ly liked “Bar­clay’s Apology”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/333004 but could­n’t care less for the messy­ness of flesh-and-blood reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty? Anoth­er Quak­er blog­ger recent­ly sent me a pri­vate email in which he con­fid­ed: “My main ques­tion of late to Quak­ers is: what is so remark­able about Quak­ers? I some­times have to be a pain-in-the-ass in order to ask these ques­tions.” That seems like both a good ques­tion and a impor­tant meet­ing role.
There’s some­thing about liv­ing both with­in a com­mu­ni­ty and out­side it. The real deal isn’t in any of our human insti­tu­tions, the­o­ries or notions yet it is through these that we live out our faith. Christ as tran­scen­dent every­thing­ness and Christ as a par­tic­u­lar guy in a par­tic­u­lar place speak­ing a par­tic­u­lar lan­guage and liv­ing a par­tic­u­lar life. The pull between the eter­nal and pecu­liar is the very essence of the human con­di­tion. The same voice that spoke to the prophets and apos­tles speaks to us today, if only we have ears to hear. How can we learn to lessen the vol­ume on our own self-kudos long enough to hear the divine whisperer?