Tough question in the bookstore today: a customer called asking for books about the connection between Friends and Anabaptists. Remarkably, we couldn’t come up with much of a list. But let’s be interactive here, readers! What books did I forget about? And what’s this phenomena of denying Quaker/Anabaptist common roots and cross-pollination?
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
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)
Swinging off the gallows and into the Glory
January 5, 2004
Oh my gosh, TheOoze has an amazing article on called “Orthodox Twenty-Somethings” (a review of “The New Faithful” and “The Younger Evangelicals”, a great book I’ve recommended. Read this article if you want to understand why Julie’s at a traditional Catholic Church and why I’m plain dressing. This is a bona fide phenomenon, folks.
None of this is supposed to be happening because it’s not the project for which two generations of Protestant and Catholic clergy have worked… The push for relativist moral teaching, “simplified” worship, interchangeable sex roles, and an utter separation of private belief from political expression has come from the pulpit as readily as it has been demanded by pseudo-intellectual elites. But against all odds, portions of a modern American society, which groans to find itself secularist, is returning in a quiet revolution to the fundamental truths of the Christian religion.
Meanwhile, no one should miss Melynda Huskey’s wonderful rant in the comments of my “Beyond Majority Rule” review. Warning: it skewers a beloved Quaker institution!
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 next 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.
Beyond the MacGuffins: Sheeran’s Beyond Majority Rule
December 26, 2003
A review of Michael Sheeran’s Beyond Majority Rule. Twenty years later, do Friends need to experience the gathered condition?
Beyond Majority Rule has one of the more unique stories in Quaker writings. Michael Sheeran is a Jesuit priest who went to seminary in the years right after the Second Vatican Council. Forged by great changes taking place in the church, he took seriously the Council’s mandate for Roman Catholics to get “in touch with their roots.” He became interested in a long-forgotten process of “Communal Discernment” used by the Jesuit order in when it was founded in the mid-sixteenth century. His search led him to study groups outside Catholicism that had similar decision-making structures. The Religious Society of Friends should consider itself lucky that he found us. His book often explains our ways better than anything we’ve written.
Sheeran’s advantage comes from being an outsider firmly rooted in his own faith. He’s not afraid to share observations and to make comparisons. He started his research with a rather formal study of Friends, conducing many interviews and attending about ten monthly meetings in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. There are sections of the book that are dry expositions of Quaker process, sprinkled by interviews. There are times where Sheeran starts saying something really insightful about early or contemporary Friends, but then backs off to repeat some outdated Quaker cliche (he relies a bit too heavily on the group of mid-century Haverford-based academics whose histories often projected their own theology of modern liberal mysticism onto the early Friends). These sections aren’t always very enlightening – too many Philadelphia Friends are unconscious of their cherished myths and their inbedded inconsistencies. On page 85, he expresses the conundrum quite eloquently:
If the researcher was to succumb to the all too typical canons of social science, he would probably scratch his head a few times atjust this point, note that the ambiguity of Quaker expression makes accurate statistical evaluation of Quaker believes almost impossible without investment of untold time and effort, and move on to analysis of some less interesting but more manageable object of study.
Fortunately for us, Sheeran does not succumb. The book shines when Sheeran steps away from the academic role and offers us his subjective observations.
There are six pages in Beyond Majority Rule that comprise its main contribution to Quakerism. Almost every time I’ve heard someone refer to this book in conversation, it’s been to share the observations of these six pages. Over the years I’ve often casually browsed through the book and it’s these six pages that I’ve always stopped to read. The passage is called “Conflicting Myths and Fundamental Cleavages” and it begins on page 84. Sheeran begins by relating the obvious observation:
When Friends reflect upon their beliefs, they often focus upon the obvious conflict between Christocentric and universalist approaches. People who feel strongly drawn to either camp often see the other position as a threat to Quakerism itself.
As a Gen-X’er I’ve often been bored by this debate. It often breaks down into empty language and the desire to feel self-righteous about one’s beliefs. It’s the MacGuffin of contemporary liberal Quakerism. (A MacGuffin is a film plot device that drives the action but is in itself never explained and doesn’t really matter: if the spies have to get the secret plans across the border by midnight, those plans are the MacGuffin and the chase the real action.) Today’s debates about Christocentrism versus Universalism ignore the real issues of faithlessness we need to address.
Sheeran sees the real cleavage between Friends as those who have experienced the divine and those who haven’t. I’d extend the former just a bit to include those who have faith that the experience of the divine is possible. When we sit in worship do we really believe that we might be visited by Christ (however named, however defined)? When we center ourselves for Meeting for Business do we expect to be guided by the Great Teacher?
Sheeran found that a number of Friends didn’t believe in a divine visitation:
Further questions sometimes led to the paradoxical discovery that, for some of these Friends, the experience of being gathered even in meeting for worship was more of a formal rather than an experiential reality. For some, the fact that the group had sat quiety for twenty-five minutes was itself identified as being gathered.
There are many clerks that call for a “moment of silence” to begin and end business – five minutes of formal silence to prove that we’re Quakers and maybe to gather our arguments together. Meetings for business are conducted by smart people with smart ideas and efficiency is prized. Sitting in worship is seen a meditative oasis if not a complete waste of time. For these Friends, Quakerism is a society of strong leadership combined with intellectual vigor. Good decisions are made using good process. If some Friends choose to describe their own guidance as coming from “God,” that their individual choice but it is certainly not an imperative for all.
Maybe it’s Sheeran’s Catholicism that makes him aware of these issues. Both Catholics and Friends traditionally believe in the real presence of Christ during worship. When a Friend stands to speak in meeting, they do so out of obedience, to be a messenger and servant of the Holy Spirit. That Friends might speak ‘beyond their Guide’ does not betray the fact that it’s God’s message we are trying to relay. Our understanding of Christ’s presence is really quite radical: “Jesus has come to teach the people himself,” as Fox put it, it’s the idea that God will speak to us as He did to the Apostles and as He did to the ancient prophets of Israel. The history of God being actively involved with His people continues.
Why does this matter? Because as a religious body it is simply our duty to follow God and because newcomers can tell when we’re faking it. I’ve known self-described atheists who get it and who I consider brothers and sisters in faith and I’ve known people who can quote the bible inside and out yet know nothing about love (haven’t we all known some of these, even in Quakerism?). How do we get past the MacGuffin debates of previous generations to distill the core of the Quaker message?
Not all Friends will agree with Sheeran’s point of cleavage. None other than the acclaimed Haverfordian Douglas V Steere wrote the introduction to Beyond Majority Rule and he used it to dismiss the core six pages as “modest but not especially convincing” (page x). The unstated condition behind the great Quaker reunifications of the mid-twentieth century was a taboo against talking about what we believe as a people. Quakerism became an individual mysticism coupled with a world-focused social activism – to talk about the area in between was to threaten the new unity.
Times have changed and generations have shifted. It is this very in-between-ness that first attracted me to Friends. As a nascent peace activist, I met Friends whose deep faith allowed them to keep going past the despair of the world. I didn’t come to Friends to learn how to pray or how to be a lefty activist (most Quaker activists now are too self-absorbed to be really effective). What I want to know is how Friends relate to one another and to God in order to transcend themselves. How do we work together to discern our divine leadings? How do we come together to be a faithful people of the Spirit?
I find I’m not alone in my interest in Sheeran’s six pages. The fifty-somethings I know in leadership positions in Quakerism also seem more tender to Sheeran’s observations than Douglas Steere was. Twenty-five years after submitting his dissertation, Friends are perhaps ready to be convinced by our Friend, Michael J. Sheeran.
Postscript: Michael J Sheeran continues to be an interesting and active figure. He continues to write about governance issues in the Catholic Church and serves as president of Regis University in Denver.
What makes a Quaker meeting house?
December 5, 2003
One of my favorite sites is the amazing NJChurchscape.com—that’s New Jersey Churchscapes, put together largely through the efforts of Frank L. Greenagel. It’s a true labor of love, a cataloging of church and meeting architecture in New Jersey. It has beautiful photos, great stories, readable essays on architecture. In a state where everything below Cherry Hill often gets ignored, South Jersey gets good coverage and there’s a lot from the old Quaker colony of West Jersey. This month’s feature is on the meetinghouse, a building of endearing simplicity and it raises a lot of questions for me of how we relate to our church buildings.
We modern-day Friends tend to think of the term meetinghouse as uniquely ours, but go back in history and you’ll find just about everyone using the term to describe the non-showy buildings they erected for religious services and town life. Drive around South Jersey and you’ll see old Methodist churches that started out life as meetinghouses and look surprisingly Quaker. Greenagel looks at the style and then asks:
At what point does a structure cease being a meetinghouse and become a church?.. With the rising affluence and increased mobility of the population came a demand for more specialized places to meet, as well as more of the basic comforts and style which heretofore were dismissed as too worldly, so many churches added smaller lecture rooms, classrooms for Sunday school, and other assembly rooms distinct from the main auditorium.
By this measure, how many of our beloved East Coast Quaker meetinghouses should really just be called “churches?” In the nineteenth century the Protestant “Sunday School Movement” was picked up by Gurneyite and Progressive Hicksite Friends, with the classes simply renamed “First Day School” in deference to Quaker sensibilities (I’ve always wondered if the name switch actually fooled anyone, but that’s another story). By the twentieth century, the new modern liberal Friends had picked up the lecture format, which like the First Day School movement had been adopted from educational models via other religious groups. Many of our larger monthly meetings have fellowship halls, classrooms, kitchens, etc. These buildings have become specialized religious worship buildings and many of them sit empty for most of the week. But not all.
Nowadays many Quaker meetings with buildings open them mid-week for use by community groups. Quaker meetinghouses host peace groups, battered women hotlines, yoga classes, religious congregations in need of a temporary home and similar causes. There’s often an element of good works in the group’s charter.
Perhaps this willingness to open our buildings up earns us the right to continue using the meetinghouse name. If so, we should be careful to resist the pressure of the insurance industry to close ourselves up in the name of liability. One uniqueness to our worship spaces is that they are not consecrated and there should be no special rules for their use. They are oversized barns and we should cherish that. We should remember not to get fetishistic about their history and we shouldn’t tie up our business meetings in endless discussions over the color of the new seat cushions. When we turn our buildings over for others’ use, we shouldn’t worry overly much if a chair or clock gets damanged or stolen. Friends know that our religion is not our buildings and that the measure of our spirit is simply how far we’ll follow God, together as a people.
Related Reading:
- There’s a very handsome book about the HABS work on Quaker meetinghouses in the greater Philadelphia area called Silent Witness: Quaker Meeting Houses In The Delaware Valley, 1695 To The Present. (only $10!).
- My friend Bob Barnett has been putting a lot of great work into a new West Jersey website.
Signs of Hope
November 26, 2003
I think I sometimes appear more pessimistic than I really am. Here are some of this week’s reasons for hope.
* Being in touch with Jorj & Sue and Barb and Tobi because of these writings (could the “Lost Generation”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000147.php be muddling towards a new coalesence?)
* A small flurry of recent talks and pamphlets about rediscovering traditional Quakerism: Marty Grundy’s 2002 lecture _Quaker Treasure: Discovering The Basis For Unity Among Friends_, Paul Lacey’s _The Authority Of Our Meetings Is The Power Of God_ , and Lloyd Lee Wilson’s “Wrestling With Our Faith Tradition”:http://www.ncymc.org/journal/ncymcjournal3.pdf (PDF)
* Tony P. saying he was grieved that Julie has left the Society of Friends and caring enough to talk to her. Thank you.
* A flyer I saw this weekend, written by PYM Religious Education staff. It was a list of what they thought they should be doing and it was really pretty good (why don’t they’d print this in _PYM News_ , it’s much better than their boilerplate entries this issue). Even more I hope the work does take a move in that direction.
* Thomas Hamm’s The Quakers in America
We’re All Ranters Now: On Liberal Friends and Becoming a Society of Finders
November 18, 2003
It’s time to explain why I call this site “The Quaker Ranter” and to talk about my home, the liberal branch of Quakers. Non-Quakers can be forgiven for thinking that I mean this to be a place where I, Martin Kelley, “rant,” i.e., where I “utter or express with extravagance.” That may be the result (smile), but it’s not what I mean and it’s not the real purpose behind this site.
Friends and Ranters
The Ranters were fellow-travelers to the Friends in the religious turmoil of seventeenth-century England. The countryside was covered with preachers and lay people running around England seeking to revive primitive Christianity. George Fox was one, declaring that “Christ has come to teach his people himself” and that hireling clergy were distorting God’s message. The movement that coalesced around him as “The Friends of Truth” or “The Quakers” would take its orders directly from the Spirit of Christ.
This worked fine for a few years. But before long a leading Quaker rode into the town of Bristol in imitation of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Not a good idea. The authorities convicted him of heresy and George Fox distanced himself from his old friend. Soon afterwards, a quasi-Quaker collection of religious radicals plotted an overthrow of the government. That also didn’t go down very well with the authorities, and Fox quickly disavowed violence in a statement that became the basis of our peace testimony. Clearly the Friends of the Truth needed to figure out mechanisms for deciding what messages were truly of God and who could speak for the Friends movement.
The central question was one of authority. Those Friends recognized as having the gift for spiritual discernment were put in charge of a system of discipline over wayward Friends. Friends devised a method for determining the validity of individual leadings and concerns. This system rested on an assumption that Truth is immutable, and that any errors come from our own willfulness in disobeying the message. New leadings were first weighed against the tradition of Friends and their predecessors the Israelites (as brought down to us through the Bible).
Ranters often looked and sounded like Quakers but were opposed to any imposition of group authority. They were a movement of individual spiritual seekers. Ranters thought that God spoke directly to individuals and they put no limits on what the Spirit might instruct us. Tradition had no role, institutions were for disbelievers.
Meanwhile Quakers set up Quarterly and Yearly Meetings to institutionalize the system of elders and discipline. This worked for awhile, but it shouldn’t be too surprising that this human institution eventually broke down. Worldliness and wealth separated the elders from their less well-to-do brethren and new spiritual movements swept through Quaker ranks. Divisions arose over the eternal question of how to pass along a spirituality of convincement in a Society grown comfortable. By the early 1800s, Philadelphia elders had became a kind of aristocracy based on birthright and in 1827 they disowned two-thirds of their own yearly meeting. The disowned majority naturally developed a distrust of authority, while the aristocratic minority eventually realized there was no one left to elder.
Over the next century and a half, successive waves of popular religious movements washed over Friends. Revivalism, Deism, Spiritualism and Progressive Unitarianism all left their mark on Friends in the Nineteenth Century. Modern liberal Protestantism, Evangelicalism, New Ageism, and sixties-style radicalism transformed the Twentieth. Each fad lifted up a piece of Quakers’ original message but invariably added its own incongruous elements into worship. The Society grew ever more fractured.
Faced with ever-greater theological disunity, Friends simply gave up. In the 1950s, the two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings reunited. It was celebrated as reconciliation. But they could do so only because the role of Quaker institutions had fundamentally changed. Our corporate bodies no longer even try to take on the role of discerning what it means to be a Friend.
We are all Ranters now
Liberal Quakers today tend to see their local Meetinghouse as a place where everyone can believe what they want to believe. The highest value is given to tolerance and cordiality. Many people now join Friends because it’s the religion without a religion, i.e., it’s a community with the form of a religion but without any theology or expectations. We are a proud to be a community of seekers. Our commonality is in our form and we’re big on silence and meeting process.
Is it any wonder that almost everyone today seems to be a hyphenated Quaker? We’ve got Catholic-Quakers, Pagan-Quakers, Jewish-Quakers: if you can hyphenate it, there’s a Quaker interest group for you. I’m not talking about Friends nourished by another tradition: we’ve have historically been graced and continue to be graced by converts to Quakerism whose fresh eyes let us see something new about ourselves. No, I’m talking about people who practice the outward form of Quakerism but look elsewhere for theology and inspiration. If being a Friend means little more than showing up at Meeting once a week, we shouldn’t be surprised that people bring a theology along to fill up the hour. It’s like bringing a newspaper along for your train commute every morning.
But the appearance of tolerance and unity comes at a price: it depends on everyone forever remaining a Seeker. Anyone who wants to follow early Friends’ experience as “Friends of the Truth” risks becomes a Finder who threatens the negotiated truce of the modern Quaker meeting. If we really are a people of God, we might have to start acting that way. We might all have to pray together in our silence. We might all have to submit ourselves to God’s will. We might all have to wrestle with each other to articulate a shared belief system. If we were Finders, we might need to define what is unacceptable behavior for a Friend, i.e., on what grounds we would consider disowning a member.
If we became a religious society of Finders, then we’d need to figure out what it means to be a Quaker-Quaker: someone who’s theology and practice is Quaker. We would need to put down those individual newspapers to become a People once more. I’m not saying we’d be united all the time. We’d still have disagreements. Even more, we would once again need to be vigilant against the re-establishment of repressive elderships. But it seems obvious to me that Truth lies in the balance between authority and individualism and that it’s each generation’s task to restore and maintain that balance.
Until Friends can find a way to articulate a shared faith, I will remain a Ranter. I don’t want to be. I long for the oversight of a community united in a shared search for Truth. But can any of us be Friends if so many of us are Ranters?
More Reading
For those interested, “We all Ranters Now” paraphrases (birthright Friend) Richard Nixon’s famous quote (semi-misattributed) about the liberal economist John Maynard Keynes.
Bill Samuel has an interesting piece called “Keeping the Faith” that addresses the concept of Unity and its waxing and waning among Friends over the centuries.
Samuel D. Caldwell gave an interesting lecture back in 1997, Quaker Culture vs. Quaker Faith. An excerpt: “Quaker culture and Quaker faith are… often directly at odds with one another in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting today. Although it originally derived from and was consistent with Quaker faith, contemporary Quaker culture in this Yearly Meeting has evolved into a boring, peevish, repressive, petty, humorless, inept, marginal, and largely irrelevant cult that is generally repugnant to ordinary people with healthy psyches. If we try to preserve our Quaker culture, instead of following the leadings of our Quaker faith, we will most certainly be cast out of the Kingdom and die.”
I talk a bit more about these issues in Sodium Free Friends, which talks about the way we sometimes intentionally mis-understand our past and why it matters to engage with it. Some pragmantic Friends defend our vagueness as a way to increase our numbers. In The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers I look at a class of contemporary seekers who would be receptive to a more robust Quakerism and map out the issues we’d need to look at before we could really welcome them in.
Are Catholics More Quaker?
November 16, 2003
I guess folks might wonder why the son of the Quaker Ranter is getting baptized in a Roman Catholic church…
[box]An updated note before I start: I don’t want this to be seen as a critique or put-down of any particular individuals but to point out what seems to me to be a pretty obvious larger dynamic within Quakerism: our religious education programs have not been doing a very good job at transmitting our faith to our young people. One measure of such programs is how many children we retain as actively-participating adults; by such measures I think we can say Quakers are failing.
And, a few perhaps obvious disclaimers: 1) there are deeply faithful people who grew up in Young Friends programs; 2) there are religious ed instructors who are worried about the message we’re giving our young people and fret as I do; 3) there are a lot of members of the RSoF who just don’t think teaching distinctly Quaker faithfulness is important and wouldn’t agree that there’s a problem.
I don’t think it’s useful to read this without also looking to my early article, The Lost Quaker Generation, which mourns the friends I’ve seen drop out of Quakerism (many of them “birthright,” i.e., born into Quaker families), and We’re all Ranters Now, which argues that our society of seekers needs to become a society of finders if we are to be able to articulate a faith to transmit.
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On June 30, 2000, Julie and I met at a national gathering of Quakers. Fourteen months later we were married at the Woodstown Friends Meetinghouse under the care of the Atlantic City Area Friends Meeting. Roughly fourteen months later, when the sparkles in our eyes were meeting with an approving nod from God and our baby was conceived, I was co-clerk of Atlantic City Area Meeting and Julie was clerk of its Outreach Committee. Ten months later, our infant son Theo was baptized at Mater Ecclesiae Roman Catholic Church in Berlin, N.J. It’s Julie’s new church; I myself remain Quaker, but without a Meeting I can quite call home. What happened?
I don’t want to try to speak for Julie and why she left Friends to return to the faith she was brought up in. But I do have to testify that the reverence, spirit and authenticity of the worship at Mater Ecclesiae is deeper than that in most Friends Meetinghouses. It’s a church with a lot of members who seem to believe in the real presence of Christ. A disclaimer that Mater Ecclesiae is unusual, one of the few churches in the country that uses the traditional Tridentine Mass or Roman Rite, and that it attracts ardent followers who have self-selected themselves, in that they’re not going to their local parish church. I don’t think it’s the Catholicism alone that draws Julie – I think the purposefulness of the worshipers is a large piece. Despite all the distractions (chants, Latin, rote confessions of faith: I’m speaking as a Friend), the worship there is unusually gathered. But more: there’s a groundedness to the faith. In a one-on-one conversation the priest explained to me the ways he thought Quakerism was wrong. I wasn’t offended – quite the contrary, I loved it! It was so refreshing to meet someone who believed what he believed, (Hey, if I didn’t believe in the degeneration of the Roman Catholic Church or the empty professions of hireling priests, I might join him. I also feel comfortable predicting that he would welcome my jousting here.)
What I can talk about is my misgivings about the prospect of raising up Theo as a Quaker in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The weakest element of the Religious Society of Friends is its children’s religious education. This is something I’ve seen manifested in two different kinds of ways: content and results.
Quakers have remarkably few expectations of their children. It’s considered remarkable if older children spend a whole ten minutes in Meeting for Worship (I’ve heard adult birthright Friends boast that they’ve never sat through a whole hour of Quaker worship). Quakers are obsessed about listening to what children have to say, and so never share with them what they believe. I’ve known adults birthright Friends who have never had conversations with their parents about the basis of their faith.
Quaker religious education programs often forgo teaching traditional Quaker faith and practice for more faddish beliefs. The basement walls of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting youth center is painted over with dancing gods, while of the big events of the Young Friends’ annual calendar is a “Quaker sweat lodge”. A culture of touch and physicality (“cuddle puddles”, backrubs) is thought charming and immodest dress is considered a sign of rebellious individuality. Quaker schools publish brochures saying Meeting for Worship is all about “thinking, with God given little notice.” When Quakers want to have “intergenerational” worship, they feel they have to program it with some sort of attention-keeping playtime activity (Mater Ecclesiae echoes Quaker tradition here: “intergenerational” means children sitting through and participating in Mass with the adults).
Too many of the people my age and Julie’s who were brought up at Friends are ignorant of basic Quaker beliefs and are unaware of Quaker traditions (FUM, EFI, Conservatives) outside the easy-going East Coast liberalism they were raised in. For them being a Friend is acting a certain way, believing a certain brand of political philosophy and being part of a certain social group. Too many Young Adult Friends I’ve known over the years are cliquish, irreligious, and have more than their share of issues around intimacy and sexuality.
Don’t get me wrong: these kids are often really good people, children to be proud of, doing great things in the world. Many of them are open-hearted, spiritually-sensitive, and in deeply grounded relationships. But only a very few are practicing Quakers. And when I look at the religious education they get, I can’t say I’m surprised. If I were to raise Theo as a Quaker, I would have to “home school” him away from most of the religious education programs offered locally. When all the kids scramble out of worship after ten minutes I’d have to say “no” and tell him to keep sitting – how weird would that be?
Theo has a better chance of sharing the traditional Quaker values of the presence of Christ, of Holy Obedience, and of bearing the cross by being raised as a Catholic in a traditionalist church. It’s more likely he’ll turn out Quaker if he’s baptised at Mater Ecclesiae. Julie and I will be teaching him reverence by example. I’ll share my Quaker faith with him. I’m sure he’ll participate in Quaker events, but consciously, selectively, guardedly (in the old Quaker sense).
If Friends believe they have a faith worth holdling, they should also believe they have a faith worth passing on. Do we?
Related Reading
- Beckey Phipps conducted a series of interviews that touched on many of these issues and published it in FGConnections. FGC Religious Education: Lessons for the 21st Century asks many of the right questions. My favorite line: “It is the most amazing thing, all the kids that I know that have gone into [Quaker] leadership programs – they’ve disappeared.”
- I touch on these issues from the other side in The Lost Quaker Generation, which is about the twenty- and thirty-something Friends that have drifted away
Dead Horses
November 12, 2003
I am so tired of phone war tax resistance. I have a fondness for the aging hippies of NWTRCC & WRL but I thought they’d given up this dead horse by now. Well, at least they’re not “resurrecting the ‘Doomsday Clock’.
Update, 12/8/03: Robert Randall, an old friend from NWTRCC, is the first to comment on the Dead Horses post.