I talked with Jack Tripp, who teaches ninth and eleventh grade English at the same Quaker school he himself attended a decade or so ago. With a religious tradition as fiercely anti-creedal as ours — and one that has morphed and evolved into various contradictory forms — how do we describe ourselves? The problem is heightened in a Quaker school settings, where only a fraction of students will be Quaker themselves. Jack’s article, Toward a Quaker Pedigree, is in the online edition of this month’s Friends Journal.
I interviewed September FJ author Scotty Utz about Guns-to-Garden Movement. Fascinating witness and some heartbreaking stories. From my intro:
One of the most profound and oft quoted statements from probably the entire Bible is from Isaiah, and it goes And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people, and they shall beat their swords into plough shares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. And this may seem like a wonderful lyrical kind of statement. But what if we actually took it seriously and actually started taking our instruments of war and turning them into pruning hooks?
I interview John Helding on the Quaker Talk podcast about “worship fluid” Quakerism.
The new issue of Friends Journal is up. I wrote the Among Friends intro this month, waxing lyrically on the “sonic landscape” of my meeting in August:
The sounds of our August silence are far from pure. Although the calls of red-shouldered hawks can be a bit harsh, hearing them reminds me that a family shares the trees of our burial ground. The crunch of the gravel in the driveway reassures me that one of our perpetual late-comers is about to join our fellowship. Not all the sounds are natural, of course. Once or twice in the hour someone will redline a motorcycle on the street outside, the whiny revs and gear changes drifting over to bounce inside our worship space. I usually try to tune out this sound, but sometimes I smile instead, knowing that someone is having fun on a hot summer day. I say a little prayer for their safety and wish them well.
I’ve also recorded a new episode of my author video podcast with John Helding, who wrote How Can I Keep from Singing? The Marvelous Mystery of Worship-Fluid Meetings. He tells a great story of going from a very died-in-the wool unprogrammed meeting to Lopez Island Worship Group (now full Quaker meeting) that scheduled monthly singing worship and worship sharing. I think I’m always going to prefer the model of sitting down quietly and waiting for the Holy Spirit but I do appreciate that it’s hard to build up a meeting culture that invites ministry. I’m happy that the worship sharing at Lopez Island helped uncork nascent ministry in the standard, open worship.
As I wrote a few years ago, I think ministry should be an expected miracle and not have quite so high a bar that people are intimidated from speaking. It takes practice to know when ministry is Spirit-led and maybe part of that practice is not always getting it right. I know some meetings face the opposite problem: ministry that is perhaps too frequent and too headstrong and inappropriate. But a Friends Meeting is a bit like a choir in that it is always needing creative renegotiation to find the sweet harmony. We are a chosen family that just shows up every week, with people experienced and new working and learning how to hold the body together.
I wrote the opening column for the January Friends Journal, which looks at Indigenous Peoples and Friends. As regular readers of this blog already no doubt know, I’m a fan of local history, especially contact-era and colonial histories and especially about relations with the Indigenous Lenape and the enslaved Africans.
The whole issue is really powerful and I hope you find it as enlightening as I did.
Where I live, in one of the colonial-era Quaker colonies of the Mid-Atlantic United States, there has long been a benevolent portrayal of Quakers’ relations with the local Indigenous Peoples. We are told that early Friend William Penn negotiated the Treaty of Shackamaxon with Lenape leader Tamanend, a moment memorialized by parks, statues, and a famous painting by Benjamin West. The great French philosopher Voltaire declared it “the only treaty never sworn to and never broken.” The new settlers bought each plot of land from the local Lenape bands. Violence in the first half-century of Quaker governance was rare; cooperation and good will were the norm.
And yet: there is no federally recognized Indigenous Nation left in this former Lenape territory. Every boatload of Quakers that sailed up from Delaware Bay brought the threat of another round of deadly smallpox. Every creek dammed to power a mill cut off the spawning fish runs that stocked upland creeks. Every pig let loose from an English farmstead ate through nearby Lenape maize and squash plantings.
Nice detective work in this article by Jim Fussell. In recent years, we’ve flipped the traditional script of Friends as unalloyed saviors for their work on manumissions and the abolition of slavery. We now affirm that many held slaves beginning in 1655, when Quaker missionaries Ann Austin and Mary Fisher landed on the heavily enslaved island of Barbados and convinced a number of the White enslavers to become Friends. A few years later Mary Fisher then went on travel to Turkey to try to convince the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Despite her amazing bravery, in her will Fisher named a “Indian girle Slave, named Reigner.” .
We now talk about the era in which Quakers were slaveholders but Jim goes a step further to talk about the enslaved Africans’ resistance to Quaker enslavers. In an era in which we’re once more apparently debating if violence against property is okay, the story of two enslaved women, Grace and Jane, burning a plantation tobacco barn seems almost quaintly direct action.
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.
British Friends become first church in UK to pull investments in companies profiting from the occupation of Palestine. From recording clerk Paul Parker:
As Quakers, we seek to live out our faith through everyday actions, including the choices we make about where to put our money. We believe strongly in the power of legitimate, nonviolent, democratic tools such as morally responsible investment to realise positive change in the world. We want to make sure our money and energies are instead put into places which support our commitments to peace, equality and justice.
A sweet interview this week over on QuakerSpeak, an interview with Carter Nash:
I believe that people will respond to love, because I believe people respond to God. And if God is love, that is what people will respond to, is love. I think that’s the key to a lot of things and to a lot of problems in the world, because if we truly believe in God and we truly believe that God is love as we were taught, and we act on that – and I believe that we are God’s hands here – then everything we do needs to be rooted in love.
Quakers