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)
Rhonda Pfaltzgraff-Carlson is back with another reflection on light and truth and love, Why Quakers Inspire Social Change. It’s a good reminder that change also needs to come from within and that the Light is also meant for us:
If Friends can see new truth from the Light as coming in love, we will be emboldened to act on our leadings and live lives worthy of our callings. We will also be more open to conflict in our meetings and yearly meetings.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., a Philadelphia TV station interviewed Quaker Norval Reece: Bucks County Quaker, Civil Rights Activist Reflects On Time With MLK
Reece is a proud Quaker and believes it’s his Quaker roots that sent him to Dr. King’s side. “I was raised to believe all people are equal, are born equal, created equal,” he said. Reece met King in 1967 at the old Robert Morris Hotel in Philadelphia. He spent several hours with the civil rights icon. Reece says that night he, King and a few others planned a poverty march for the following spring, but King never made it.
Norval was an activist with AFSC back in his youth, served as a Pennsylvania secretary of commerce, and became a cable television entrepreneur. He’s pretty ubiquitous in Quaker circles these days, linking the activist and entrepreneurial in interesting ways. My favorite part of the video is when they casually redisplay a picture they had blurred out near the beginning (the one in the preview) and don’t bother naming the guy walking just ahead of him.
Mike Farley looks at Quaker stories of Easter and the difficulties of distracting the Holy Spirit:
I am at least as susceptible as anyone I know to self-deception and wishful thinking, to being untrue to myself and to God, and to looking outside myself, at the external aspects of thought and practice among people of faith, trying to distract myself from the work of the Spirit in my heart. But it is less easy to distract the Holy Spirit, and so I have been called back again and again to these uncomfortable, at times downright dangerous, places, out in the saltmarshes of the heart.
The August issue of Friends Journal will look at “Going Viral with Quakerism.” I wrote an Editor’s Desk post with some ideas of topics I’d love to see and some queries:
One thing that’s missing there is the internet. Yet one of the most common things people want to talk about when we talk about growing Friends is the internet. I think we’ve gotten to the point at which we can’t just pin our hopes for future vitality of the Religious Society of Friends on the internet. It’s not a build-it-and-they-will come phenomenon, especially now that so much of the internet’s attention mechanisms are dominated by billion-dollar companies.
I went into the Friends Journal archives to get a little perspective on Friends’ evolving relationship with electronic media. The word “internet” first showed up near the end of 1992, in a short announcement of a new Quaker-themed listserv. In 1993 there was a fantastic article on electronic networks, The Invisible Meetinghouse. Written by Joel GAzis-SAx, it describes the Quaker Electronic Project as
an ongoing yearly meeting that Friends around the world can join any time. It is, at once, a library, a meetinghouse, a social center, and a bulletin board. W e have created both a community and a resource center…
Amazingly, many of the people mentioned in this article from 25 years ago are still active online.
The first “http” web address was published in Friends Journal in a 1995 issue. In June 2001 the magazine announced its own website; the word “blog” debuted in 2004, “Facebook” in 2007, “Twitter” in 2011. Obviously, the internet is great for outreach. But time check: we’ve been collectively reaching out online for a quarter century. Every organization has a website. Blogs and social media have become a settled tool in outreach.
Introductions to the web and techniques and how-to’s have been done. But how do these various media work together to advance our visibility? What kind of expanded outreach could happen with a little more focus? How does any online project integrate with real-world activity. I’m not naysaying the internet; obviously, I could give my answers to these questions. But I’d like to know what others think about our Quaker electronic projects a quarter century later?
Long-time Quaker blogger Mark Wutka wonders if we’ve inadvertently brought back in a doctrinal statement with our easy response to the question of Quaker belief:
Do Friends today have faith and trust in ‘that of God’ in every person? Are we striving to answer ‘that of God’ in others, and do we have the faith that doing so may eventually bring them away from evil? I ask this because much of the discourse today seems to ignore this.
“That of God in everyone” is one of those phrases that many traditional-leaning Friends have found a bit problematic over the years. Quaker co-founder George Fox used it, but sparingly. It doesn’t even appear in his Journal. If you were looking for an “elevator pitch” of his beliefs, I would go with his spiritual opening that there is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to our condition. The most well-argued (perhaps over-argued) expose of “that of God” as a latter-day Quaker overlay came from Lewis Benson’s famous essay from 1970, ‘That of God in Every Man” — What Did George Fox Mean by It?
In the second half of the piece Mark asks whether our belief of that of God leads us to act differently in the political sphere. He struggles with this, as do I, and as do presumably all of us. I worry particularly about judging the way Friends act; whenever I see someone share a hard truth, I know I’ll quickly see someone else critique them for being too divisive, too “unQuakerly.”
Jesus famously overturned the money changers and Benjamin Lay spilled pig blood in yearly meeting sessions. Maybe the only guide we have is the active Guide. Maybe our orderly walking will look alternatively meek or divisive depending on the cues we’re given. And maybe we’ll be misunderstood even as we’re being the most faithful.
Mark finishes:
For now, I am striving to walk in the Light as best I can and manifest the fruit of the Spirit in my interactions with people
I was just filling out my work log for March and had forgotten just how crazy the weather here in the U.S. Northeast had been, with successive waves of nor’easters dumping massive amounts of snow on us. It made for some great kid pictures but it added quite a bit of chaos to work schedules.
So it seems kind of amazing there’s an April issue of Friends Journal. But there is and it’s a good one I think: we look at healing. The cover of new tree leaves backlit by springtime sun is seasonal but it also reflects the topic and our mood after a wintry late winter.
Well this one hits home for me. The new QuakerSpeak talks to Oregon social worker Melody George in the topic of Quakers and Mental Health:
I really see mental diversity as a gift to a community, and that the folks that I serve and that I’ve worked with are very resilient. If they tell you their stories about how they’ve gotten through their traumatic situations and what’s helped them to keep going, faith is a huge part of that. And we have a lot to learn from their strength and resilience.
My family has had very avoidable and out-of-nowhere conflicts at two religious spaces — one a Friends meeting and the other a Presbyterian church — over easy accomodations for my son Francis. It seems like many of the dynamics that we’ve seen are not dissimilar to those that keep others out of meeting communities. Who are we willing to adapt for? Is comfort and familiarity our main goal?
Melody also wrote for Friends Journal a few years ago, Imagining a Trauma-informed Quaker Community.
From Jnana Hodson’s blog, a look at “The Seed” as a Quaker metaphor:
Considering today’s emphasis on individuality, plurality, and personal psychology, I believe that returning to the metaphor of the Seed holds the most potential for fertile spiritual development and guidance in our own era.
I find the evolution of Quaker metaphors fascinating. Early Quaker sermons and epistles were packed with biblical allusions. I grew up relatively unchurched but I’ve tried to make up for it over the years. I’ve read the Bible cover-to-cover using the One Year Bible plan (like a lot of people I suspect, it took me a little over two years) and have been part of different denominational Bible study groups. I try to look up references. But even with that I don’t catch half the references early sermons packed in.
John Woolman lived a couple of generations after the first Friends. We Quaker remember his Journal for ministry of its anti-slavery sentiments, finally becoming a consensus among Friends by the time of its publication in 1774. But other religious folks have read it for its literary value. Open a random page and Woolman will have up to half a dozen metaphors for the Divine. It’s packed and rich and accessible. I find a kind of particular Quaker spiritual truth in Woolman’s rotation of metaphors: it implies that divinity is more than any specific words we try to stuff it into.
Lately Quaker metaphors have tended to become more sterile. I think we’re still worried about specifics but instead of expanding our language we contract it into a kind of impenetrable code. The “Light of Christ” becomes the “Inward Christ” then the “Inward Light” then “the Light” or “Spirit.” We’re still echoing the Light metaphors packed into the Book of John but doing so in such a way that seems particularly parochial to Friends and non-obvious to newcomers. A major New Testament theme is reduced to Quaker lingo.
Jnana Hodson’s problem with “the seed” as metaphor is interesting: “ ‘seed,’ as such, has far fewer Biblical citations than the corresponding complementary ‘light’ or ‘true’ and ‘truth’ do.” I’m not sure I ever noticed that. I like the seed, with its organic connotations and promise of future growth. But apparently the few biblical allusions were rather sexist (spoiler: it often meant semen) and lacking in biological awareness. It feels like Friends are searching for neutral metaphors like “the seed” these days; we also have a lot of gatherings around “weaving.” I certainly don’t think we should be limited to first century images of divinity but I also don’t think we’ve quite figured out how we can talk about the guidance we receive from the Inward Teacher.
The Seed, initially, is the most problematic of the three central Quaker metaphors
Friends Journal 
earofthesoul.blogspot.com