I talked today with December Friends Journal author Becky Jones. Her article “The Intimacy of Prayer” appears in the current issue. I really appreciated talking about how we hold people in love, in the light, in prayer. One of my own methods is just to keep a prayer list on my phone but in prepping this interview I realized I hadn’t contributed to it in a year. Wow! If for nothing else, I’m grateful to be reminded that I should use that list more, as it keeps me more mindful of loved ones and acquaintances in my life.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Talking about Who We Believe In
December 11, 2025
I talked with Tom Gates this week about the nature of belief. He has an article in the current Friends Journal titled “Beyond What Words Can Utter.”
We agreed that a lot of Quaker belief can only be experienced, not described, which makes for difficulties when doing outreach. It’s easy to go into nuance once someone has coming into the meetinghouse and is participating in an education program but how do we get them off the street in the first place. Tom said:
I’m comfortable with Christ language and the inward light of Christ. And I know there are friends who are not, and there are good reasons why they’re not. I’m not denying that. in these newcomer sessions a persistent question is: Are Quakers Christian? And how do you understand that? And they’re mostly coming from backgrounds and other kind of more conservative churches.
And so that’s a live question for them because in some sense they all left those churches because the fundamentalism was grating on them. I always pull off this thing from my shelf, it’s the Reader’s Guide to George Fox’s Journal by Joseph Pickvance. And he makes a fascinating statement: the commonest cause of misunderstanding of Fox’s teaching today is a failure to realize how wide and deep and functional is the meaning that quote Christ had for him.
Our discussion ranged quite a bit, from Art Larrabee’s “Nine Core Quaker Beliefs” to Marcus Borg’s Heart of Christianity and 1653’s Saul’s Errand to Damascus, by James Nayler and George Fox. I definitely need to do some more reading!
Full show notes and a transcript are available.
Tom has also written a follow-up post on Quaker belief on his blog.
Young adults profiled in publications
December 7, 2025
Two recent articles in publications have gotten some buzz. One written by AP reporter Luis Andres Henao looks at a rise of young adult interest in Friends and profiles a dramatic increase in attendance at Arch Street Meeting in Philadelphia. It’s been reprinted in a lot of newspapers. It quotes a Valerie Goodman:
“It feels like I can have a minute to breathe. It’s different than having a moment of meditation in my apartment because there’s still all of the distractions around,” Goodman says. “And it’s crazy being in a room full of other people that are all there to experience that themselves.”
The other is a beautiful essay by a new UK Friend, who explains the appeal of the silence:
It was as if someone had turned down the volume of the world, and all that remained was my feelings, sitting raw and open like a wound. Rather than running, I sat for an hour and let them wash over me. I left with a fresher perspective and spent the rest of the day in a calm daze. For the first time in a while, I felt anchored to something greater than myself.
What Do Quakers Believe?
December 1, 2025
How’s the old joke go? Ask five Quakers what they believe and you’ll get ten answers. Undaunted, December’s Friends Journal tries to give some answers to the question anyway. I very much hope that individual Friends will find viewpoints they really like as well as ones they really don’t like, or at least don’t agree with. That there are no pat answers is itself part of the answer to the question.
Bonus: we’ve been working on expanding our international inclusion in the magazine and an article from Salvadoran Jasson Arevalo on the role of Quaker pastors is the first fruits of our new Latin American correspondent’s outreach efforts.
Fostering Empathy Through Fiction Writing
November 24, 2025
I talked with Peterson Toscano about his fiction piece in the November issue of Friends Journal and we segued into all sorts of byways into how fiction can show us parts of spiritual lives that straight-ahead essays can’t.
Elizabeth Spiers on Early Blogging
October 24, 2025
She describes a different time, indeed.
Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication.
I appreciate her comments on invested readers. The number of people who were part of the “Quaker blogosphere” back in day was not that large but something about the crucible of the writing and debating meant that they developed ideas that have outsized influence today. The same sorts of conversations continue to happen today in corners of Facebook, Reddit, and Discord but there’s not the same sort of feeling of shared community.
Letter Regarding FUM Finances
October 23, 2025
I thought that the expose on Earlham College was going to be this week’s Quaker financial melt-down story but Friends United Meeting did the proverbial “hold my beer” and announced it’s in serious financial peril.
Friends United Meeting (FUM) is the largest Quaker membership organization in the world. Simplifying quite a bit, it grew out of the Gurneyites, the more churchy branch of Quakers who often adopted ministry and international missions. Those missions are the reason why there are so many Quakers in places like East Africa and Bolivia. Most of the worldwide body of Friends are part of that movement and many are formal members of FUM.
Theologically, today’s FUM is a “big tent” association that tries to hold together a wildly divergent set of beliefs and cultural norms, with gender and sexuality being the most common lightning point. There’s always corners of FUM threatening to leave or threatening to withhold membership dues. There was serious talk in the 1990s of a “realignment” that would split up FUM along evangelical and universalist lines but somehow that’s never quite happened and the tent has held. To its credit the big tent approach means that FUM has been a key facilitator of cross-branch dialogue among North American Friends.
The financial problem is pretty straightforward, a story as old as nonprofits:
Our audits have not been done in a timely fashion, internal financial controls have been missing, and we did not ensure that good accounting practices were being followed. We have not been careful enough in reviewing financial information given to us or in developing the ability of new board members to understand FUM’s complex financial structure.
I’m genuinely surprised that FUM leadership was this asleep at the wheel but I sympathize. A nonprofit I worked for in the 1990s went through a similar crisis when a few years of backlogged audits came back and showed us we were in far worse shape than we had imagined. The other major U.S. Quaker association, Friends General Conference, went though something similar in the 1980s; the story I’ve heard is that the lawyers told them they were broke to go bankrupt and they figured their way out of the financial hold.
Many nonprofits go through boom and bust cycles but this sounds more than just that. I do hope Friends United Meeting can pull through.
Earlham College’s woes
October 22, 2025
Chris Hardie has written a very informative piece about what’s happening at Earlham College, the beloved Quaker school out in Richmond, Indiana. The news is pretty grim. Take this devastating detail: “In 2007, Earlham had over 1,200 undergraduate students. This fall, that number was 671. The college has mostly retained the same number of teaching faculty in that time…”
This has been happening for awhile. Then-dean of Earlham School of Religion Matt Hisrich warned us about some of this back in late 2020 when he revealed that Earlham College was raiding what had always been treated as ESR’s endowment. By all accounts the current EC president is doing his best after inheriting a mess but cutting programs and reducing staff isn’t goin to help turn it around.
Unfortunately, this spiral is becoming ever more common with small liberal arts colleges. The pandemic hit hard and a current drop in students (a baby bust that started in the 2008 recession) is just going to make things that much harder for these kinds of schools.
I appreciate Hardie writing this. Back in 2013 I got to know him as a fellow panelist at an ESR leadership conference and we’ve kept in touch over the years. In recent years he’s been on a task almost as quixotic as saving small colleges: he bought a paper, the Western Wayne News (publisher of this article), and has been trying to build a model of a sustainable local paper. I shared his great manifesto in defense of the open internet a few years ago and try to keep up with his blog. I’m glad to see Friends are sharing today’s article pretty widely on Facebook.
Earlham College has long been an invaluable part of the Quaker institutional landscape and Earlham School of Religion fills a need that no other school comes close to. Seeing these on the edge is worrisome for the whole Society of Friends. Guilford College in North Carolina has been having a rough go of it as well, though champions like my friend Wess Daniels have been passionate at drumming up support.
Western Wayne News