Last weekend I was invited to speak to Abington (Pa.) Meeting’s First-day school…

November 8, 2011

11/08/2011 · Martin Kelley

Last weekend I was invited to speak to Abington (Pa.) Meeting’s First-day school (n.b. proper FJ stylesheet) to talk about vocal ministry in worship. I haven’t been to worship at that meeting for eons and can’t speak to the condition of its ministry, but I do know that vocal ministry can be something of a mystery for unprogrammed Friends. Many of us are “convinced,” coming to the Society as adults and often have a nagging feeling we’re play-acting at being Friends, but I’ve met many life-long Quakers who also wonder about it.

Perhaps as a response to these feelings, we sometimes get rather pedantic that whatever way we’ve first encountered is the Quaker way. The current fashion of vocal ministry in the Philadelphia area is for short messages, often about world events, often confessional in nature. What I wanted to leave Abington with was the radically different ways unprogrammed Friends have worshipped over time and how some of our practices outside worship were developed to help nurture Spirit-led ministry.

(written this a.m. but only posted to limited circles, cut and pasted when I saw the mix-up)

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I thought I’d try an experiment

November 8, 2011

11/08/2011 · Martin Kelley

My life is now such that I don’t have the time to do long-form, thoughtful blogging. When I have time to think about big ideas expressed in well-chosen words, it’s as editor at Friends Journal. I have a rather long commute but it’s broken up with transfers, I often have to stand and I usually don’t have a laptop on me. What I do have is a smart phone, which I use to keep up with Quaker blogs, listen to podcasts and take pictures.

Despite this, I can usually write a few paragraphs at a time. Kept at steadily those could amass into blog posts. But the finishing-up effort is hard. I have a 2/3rds completed post lavishing high praise for +Jon Watts’s new album sitting on my phone but haven’t had the chance to finish, polish and publish. So what if I serialized these? Write a few paragraphs at a time, invite commentary, perhaps even alter things in a bit of crowd-sourcing?

Any feedback I’d get would help keep up my enthusiasm for the topic. This informal post-as-chat was actually the dominant early model for blogs, one that fell away as they became more visible. It’d be nice to get back to that. The medium seems obvious to me: Google+, which allows for extended informal posts. So I’ll try that. These will be beta thoughts-on-electron. If they seem to gell together, I might then polish and publish to QuakerRanter.org, but no promises. This is mostly a way to get some raw ideas out there.

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I gave a talk at Abington Meeting’s First-day school this morning

November 6, 2011

11/06/2011 · Martin Kelley

Here’s a few scenes from the meetinghouse and grounds beforehand.

In album Scenes of Abington Meeting (10 photos)

CameraZOOM-20111106095100061

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The fall of Corzine, in the New Yorker

November 5, 2011

11/05/2011 · Martin Kelley

The fall of Corzine, in the New Yorker

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News Desk: Corzine’s Downfall
The collapse this week of the broker-dealer MF Global and the comeuppance of its chief executive Jon Corzine, who resigned Friday, have been and will be put to many political and rhetorical purposes.…

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Umm, so Google, I hit your +1 button and it doesn’t post to Google+ (it’s…

November 3, 2011

11/03/2011 · Martin Kelley

Umm, so Google, I hit your +1 button and it doesn’t post to Google+ (it’s a opt-in tab on profiles, but who’s going to see that). You really should think through these names. Just saying.

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“The drafters of the statement included Quaker Symon Hill who has written of…

November 1, 2011

11/01/2011 · Martin Kelley

“The drafters of the statement included Quaker Symon Hill who has written of the statement: “As one of the drafters of the statement, I want to make clear that we want to act in solidarity with people of other religions and of none, not impose our religion on them or claim to be a more important part of the movement than they are. This point is made in the opening line of the statement.”

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A Quaker presence at Occupy London
Almost 100 Quakers attended a Meeting for Worship on the steps of saint Paul’s cathedral in London on Sunday afternoon. The Meeting for Worship took place in support of the Occupy London movement that…

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