On the train this morn­ing I read Eliz­a­beth Caz­den’s “Fel­low­ships, Con­fer­ences and Asso­ci­a­tions: The Lim­its of the Lib­er­al Quak­er Rein­ven­tion of Meet­ing Polity”:http://www.bhfh.org/Bhfh-PubDesc.html#FCA. This 36 page pam­phlet is a must-read for all of us Quak­er Ranters.

Usu­al­ly I excerpt a par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing sen­tence or two from books I rec­om­mend. But for this, I’d have to excerpt the whole pam­phlet: it’s that good. Caz­den real­ly lays out how the “fel­low­ship” mod­el of Quak­erism became dom­i­nant in the last sev­en­ty years and talks about both its lim­i­ta­tions and strengths. Here’s the descrip­tion I wrote for Quakerbooks:
bq. A look at the “con­fu­sion and dis­agree­ment” about how meet­ings gov­ern them­selves. Caz­den reviews clas­si­cal Quak­er mod­els and then looks at the “alter­nate mod­el that has come to char­ac­ter­ize lib­er­al unpro­grammed (‘Friends Gen­er­al Conference-type’) meet­ings in North Amer­i­ca.” An impor­tant read for any­one try­ing to under­stand con­tem­po­rary Quak­er debates over same-sex mar­riage, the mean­ing of mem­ber­ship, the role of com­mit­tees and issues of lead­er­ship in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends.
Caz­den talks about many of the issues we’ve been dis­cussing on this site. She’s one of the few Quak­er his­to­ri­ans that will dis­cuss the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry and she’s one of the few who remain seri­ous­ly engaged with Friends, hav­ing served as clerk of New Eng­land Year­ly Meet­ing. You can “order it from Bea­con Hills Friends House”:http://www.bhfh.org/Bhfh-PubDesc.html#FCA. I won­der if we could get some sort of online book group going to talk about this?