There’s a new top-five list of articles from Friends Journal so far in 2025. We have a couple of news ones — the lawsuits against DHS and the recent Quaker Walk — but we also have more contemplative fair.
I like the story of the Friends at William Penn University in Iowa discovering some of the positive qualities of plain dress from a internet challenge. And Gail Melix (Greenwater)‘s reflection on being both Quaker and Indigenous is quite moving.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and Friends in Business sponsored a two-person panel last night called “Quaker Voices, Digital Paths” and featuring Gloria Sullivan, who has over 600,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, and Griffin Macaulay, content creator for Dungeons and Dragons. Gloria doesn’t generally talk about being a Quaker on her channel but did in January. It’s had over 300,000 views and a staggering 6,042 comments.
The scale of the newer forms of online media is really staggering, as is the simplicity of starting a channel. There’s no need to incorporate or find funders or write mission statements: you just start talking to the computer. It quickly becomes all-consuming of course, and there’s a lot of thought that goes into the topics and scope of the channel. All the popular TikToks also have lots of edits to speed them up. It’s a lot of work to do this part or full-time.
Griffin talked about being known for a thing and remaining passionate about it even in a vacuum. It’s the follow-your-passion advice: loving what you do will pull people to you and you will find a way to turn it into a business.
In some ways, I feel that at least some of the work my colleagues and I are doing 1is akin to an outfielder scanning the sky for pop balls coming in from these internet mentions. When a popular influencer talks about Quakers I’m sure hundreds of fingers open a new tab to ask “What is a Quaker?” and “What Do Quakers Believe?” We hopefully show up in the search with easily-digestible answers and links to Quaker communities. I asked Gloria and Griffin for ideas about how we could better support inquirers they might send our way. We’re doing a lot already — good search engine optimization, catchy URLs — but there was some good advice on using Instagram better and really simplifying our messaging and turning it into stories.
An obit to the vegetarian-promoting author of Diet for a New America. The book came out when I was an very active activist in college. My primary motivation to become vegetarian was gut level — why kill animals for food when you don’t have to? — but Robbins’s book gave an intellectual backbone I found convincing and I appreciated learning about the environmental and health aspects of a vegetarian diet (as I’ve grown older, the latter feel even more important).
Great detail at the end:
In the late 1980s, his son said, John Robbins reconciled with his father: Irv Robbins, suffering from weight issues, heart disease and diabetes, was given a copy of “Diet for a New America” by his cardiologist. The doctor had no idea that the book had been written by his patient’s son.
Veg News also has an article on his life and impact.
Having started out my blogging life as a writer on nonviolence, I must admit it’s hard to really respond to this week’s military actions with the gravity they deserve. Quaker organizations like AFSC and FCNL are speaking out, as they must (“We must act now” and “You can’t bomb your way to peace”) but I can’t get over just how much theater this all is. President Trump gave Iran advance warning of the incoming bunker bombs, plenty of time for Iran to get its stockpiles of near-weapons-grade material out of harm’s way. When Iran retaliated with missiles against U.S. bases in Qatar, they too gave advance warning, giving the U.S. anti-missile defenses the heads-up needed to defend and destroy the incoming barrage.
In reports, Trump is said to have decided on the Iran attack in part because he felt Israel was getting such “good press” for its attacks against Iran (not surprisingly, he fixates on Fox News coverage, which was all-in for Netanyahu’s attacks). U.S. military intelligence says the attacks on Fordo, Iran’s primary nuclear-enrichment site, only delayed a possible creation of a nuclear weapon by months. Why generate such ill-will for such a temporary advantage?
Of course, would we even be in this mess if Trump hadn’t scuttled the hard-won negotiations of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal framework. Even at the time it seemed like Trump was mostly acting out of jealousy that a long-term solution had been the result of his predecessor’s work. There doesn’t seem to be any overarching logic to any of this. It’s all for the TV coverage (the rest of the world’s leaders seem to have figured this out). Is there a really an end-game to Israel assassinating so much of Iranian leadership, including some of the very people who were negotiating deals? And in the midst of this, a real solution to the Palestinian — Israel conflict seems further away than ever.
Peaceful conduct is the best way to set up peaceful resolutions. Iran has always been a country with potential. Encouraging it to give up nuclear and terroristic ambitions, promising it lasting safety, and slowly integrating it back into the world economy is really a win-win for all sides. So why all this theater? What’s the end plan anyway? Or is that such a naive thing to even ask in 2025?
“In my travels and experience with Quakers today, I encounter Friends who are going deeper, learning more about the radical faith roots of our faith community, and are willing and able to hear others’ voices and experiences with “listening in tongues” (learning to translate others’ words about the Holy into language that speaks to their own condition). I believe this under-the-radar Quaker revival will continue to deepen and grow in many ways and many places. However, to my mind a great and lasting Quaker revival will require us to do the following:”
Okay, so this is creepy. On her YouTube channel, Taylor Lorenz looks into the phenomenon of people taking AI to be God-like. It’s part influencer grift and part mental health breakdown.
I wrote the introductory column for the June/July issue of Friends Journal, which is devoted to revivals.
It’s my pet theory that Quakerism is always dying and simultaneously always being reborn. It’s been a messy process with lots of hurt feelings. Many people have left Friends, and there are a bewildering number of institutional schisms still dividing us. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.
In the past couple of of months I’ve noticed various Friends using this image of Margaret Fox as a stand-in for Margaret Fell, the so-called “mother” of Quakerism who later married George Fox. Unfortunately it’s a few centuries late. This picture is Margaret Fox of Hydesville, N.Y. It’s from an 1885 book called The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, in which she and her family describe their haunted house. Their three daughters, Margaretta, Kate, and Leah, became known as the Fox Sisters, and became the most famous trio in nineteenth-century Spiritualism. In later years Margaretta admitted the hauntings were hoaxes, alas.
There is a Quaker connection, as the sisters helped convince leading radical Hicksites Amy and Isaac Post to adopt Spiritualism and start communing with the dead. Issac later wrote “spirit writings” under the bylines of people like George Fox and Benjamin Franklin.2 It would be super easy to make fun of the Posts but they also opened their home as an Underground Railroad stop and were personal friends of William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass (who they helped escape to Canada after he was implicated in the John Brown raid at Harper’s Ferry). They were leading figures in what became known as the Progressive Friends movement, whose energy is still palpable in Liberal Quaker circles.
The internet being what it is, there are plenty of websites that have taken this out of context and presented it as Margaret Fell Fox. Unfortunately there are no contemporary images of Margaret Fell. The best we have is a twentieth-century representation of her by Robert Spence, who over thirty years made a number of charming line drawings of the life of George Fox (Friends Journal used one for an illustration in a recent article).
I am writing this post simply to show up in future search results. If I can prevent one person from mistakenly using this image as an illustration or basis for a piece of art then it will have been worth it.
Also, FYI, this is what portraits looked like in Margaret Fell’s time:
Friends Journal 
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