The bike parade was again sponsored by Toy Market, the independent toy store in town (supplier of much of our household’s Santa delivery). They had a table full of red, white, and blue bunting that we could apply to the bikes. We all had a lot of fun.

Notes for next year: a tandem extension on a adult bike looked like fun and then 7‑yo Gregory will be a good age for this (we should dig ours out from the back of the garage). Also: the parade has a dog contingent so maybe a much-calmer Francis will be able to be part of that next year (we’re due to pick up the service dog in 12 days!, eeek!!!)

• Strongtowns blog and podcast. Charles Marohn
• Geography of Nowhere. James Howard Kunstler’s 1993 book on suburban sprawl, which I loved at the time.
• The Big Sort. Bill Bishop, 2008.
• The Great Good Place. Ray Oldenburg. Popularized the “third places” concept of places people can gather together outside of home and work (as example: the coffee shop in which we met, Grooveground, didn’t seem to mind six people nattering on about urbanism until closing time).
• Amy Cuddy’s Ted Talk, “Your body language shapes who you are” (in our context, we were suggesting a correlation between road rage and the physical poses of driving)
• The End of the Suburbs.  Leigh Gallagher, 2014
• Fighting Traffic. Peter D. Norton
• Wrestling with Moses. Anthony Flint’s 2009 book that goes behind the scenes of Jane Jacob’s planning battles with the near-mythic highway builder Robert Moses, a subtext that underlies Death and Life but is mostly just hinted at.
• Antifragile: Things That Gain with Disorder. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 212.
• Jacobin Magazine has published pieces about how Jane Jacob’s insights and language have been coopted by market forces. See “Liberalism and Gentrification” and “The People’s Playground.”
• I kept thinking about a big issue Jacobs kepts skirting about: race.  It’s really impossible for me to look at urban patterns without thinking about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.” Decades of redlining and the racial components of who gets mortgages is a big factor in our social geography (see also TNC’s Atlantic colleague Alexis C. Madrigal’s “The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood” and ponder why charming Collingswood is 82 percent white while adjoining Camden is only 18 percent).
• Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York. Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez. A graphic novel of Robert Moses (no way!). “How New York Became New York” is an review of the novel.

Update: And also, from Genevieve’s list:

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams, for its absurdist humor around the bureaucracies of planning
• Green Metropolis. David Owen,
• “What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse,” an article by Adam Mann in Wired on the phenomenon of induced demand.
• Vision Zero Initiative
• The Pine Barrens. John McPhee, the classic which I brought up.
• The Power Broker. Robert Caro.
• The Ecology of Commerce. Paul Hawken
• Organizing in the South Bronx. Jim Rooney
• Re: race: Dalton Conley’s Being Black, Living in the Red and When Work Disappears by William Julius Wilson.
• Re: bicycles: Urban Bikers’ Tricks & Tips. Dave Glowacz

Excuse me for the next six months while I read. 🙂

A note about names: she was born in late summer 1930 as Elizabeth Ann Kleintop. In her adult life she went as Betsy and took the last names of her partners. In her late 60s she decided to take back a variation of her last name and overnight Betsy Kelley became Liz Klein.

For an early, short, period Quakers were so in-your-face and notorious that they could draw a crowd just by walking a few miles up the road to the next town. More recently, we’ve attracted newcomers as much by the example of our lives than by any outreach campaign. When I talk to adult newcomers, they often cite some Quaker example in their lives–a favorite teacher or delightfully eccentric aunt.

People can sense when there’s something of greater life in the way we approach our work, friendships, and families. Let me be the first in line to say I’m horribly imperfect. But there are Quaker techniques and values and folkways that are guides to genuinely good ways to live in the world. There’s nothing exclusively Quaker about them (indeed, most come from careful reading of the Gospels and Paul’s letters), but they are tools our religious community has emphasized and into which we’ve helped each other live more fully.

In the last fifteen years, the ways Friends are known has undergone a radical transformation. The Internet has made us incredibly easy to find and research. This is a mixed blessing as it means others are defining who we are. Careful corporate discernment conducted through long-developed techniques of Quaker process are no match for the “edit” button in Wikipedia or some commercial site with good page rank.

That said, I think people still are discovering Friends through personal examples. George Fox told us to be patterns and examples in the world and to answer that of God in everyone. A lot of our exampling and answering today is going to be on the threaded comments of Facebook and Twitter. What will they find? Do we use Facebook like everyone else, trolling, spamming, engaging in flame wars, focusing on ourselves? Or do Quaker folkways still apply. Here are some questions that I regularly wrestle with:

• When I use social media, am I being open, public, and transparent?
• Am I careful to share that which is good and eternal rather than titillating for its own sake?
• Do I remember that the Good News is simply something we borrow to share and that the Inward Christ needs to do the final delivery into hearts?
• Do I pray for those I disagree with? Do I practice holding my tongue when my motivation is anger or jealousy?

What struggles do others face? What might be our online folkways?

FAITH: This is an invitation for a gathering for young adult Friends ages 18–35 from all the branches of the Religious Society of Friends from all across the continent. It’s going to be in Wichita Kansas from May 28–31. It’s a time to get together and learn about each other, to hear each other’s stories and worship together. We’re really excited by this opportunity to have people who have never been to these before and to have people who have been to other gatherings to come back.
MICAH: A lot of the advance material is already up online so you can get a good idea what this conference is going to be about and to get a sense of how to prepare yourself for a gathering like this. We’ll be getting together with folks from all over the country, Canada and Mexico–we’re hoping a lot of Hispanic Friends show up and we’ve already translated the website into Spanish. Registration is set up already; early registration goes until April 15. Airfare to Wichita is looking pretty good at the moment; if you register early you’re likely to get a fairly decent plane ticket out.
FAITH: We’re hoping people will choose to carpool together. So get organized, register early and look at the advance materials online.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
2010 Young Adult Friends Conference

As regular readers will know, I’m leading a workshop called “Strangers to the Covenant” with Zachary Moon and this morning was the first workshop. Although it was billed as a workshop for high school students and adult young Friend (so 15–35 years old), though almost all of the participants are high schoolers (what does that mean?). It seems like a great bunch. I arrived about fifteen minutes early to center in worship; two of the attenders came in the room and sat with me and one by one everyone came in and joined the worship. I had to wonder if a group of older Friends would have been able to resist the temptation to ask about each other’s jewelry, complain about the air conditioning, etc.

Julie reports that the cafeteria food is good. We’ve also been happy patrons of Gillie’s and Bollo’s Cafe.

One of the “stars” charts at the consultation

Being the information design geek, I converted the resultant votes to into qualities and colors and put them into a chart showing interest level. Projects that received no votes from a particular age range are labeled “none,” for no interest; 2–3 stars is “weak” interest and so forth, up to “HOT” which are projects which received over 7 stars from an age group.

As an example, take “develop spirituality.” Seven adult young Friends (aged 18–37) put a star down for this, indicating they thought it was something FGC should promote, hence “strong” (bright red) interest from this age group. No Friend over forty used one of their stars to indicate interest in this work, indicating that none of them thought FGC should be promoting spiritual development. Here are the results:

Things Younger Friends wanted more than Older Friends:
In order by AYF popularity:

• MENTORSHIP: The AYFs really want cross-generational mentoring relationships. When the questions were first posed, there only “mentoring by older Friends” and “mentoring to younger Friends.” Check the math and you’ll see that’s the same question (whoever put the questions together forgot that the Quaker understanding of eldership is not necessarily a function of age, hmm). I grabbed a pencil and added “mentoring to older Friends” and it was instantly popular. Even though the mentorship issue was spread over three questions, AYF’s voted “strongly” for each of them, showing terrific popular support. Almost no over-40 Friend voted for this. This is not something that can be forced onto disinterested older Friends, which means I think we young-in’s are going to have to rely on one another for mentorship.
• SUPPORT FOR AYF CONFERNCES: Younger Friends want to spend more time together. Note should be made that the voters were Friends attending a conference and that we were a selected and self-selected group who presumably like to attend conferences. Still, this is popular.
• TALKING ABOUT OUR FAITH: It’s sad that only two older Friends thought explaining the faith was worthwhile. At the same time it’s encouraging that 13 AYFs wanted this. It’s very clear that younger Friends aren’t as afraid of talking about serious faith issues as the Baby Boomers (it’s nice to see some of my essays confirmed!).

Things Older Friends wanted more than Younger Friends:

• TAPPING THE YOUTH: There was what I thought was a semi-obnoxious question about how to “tap the energy and passion” of younger Friends. This is very close to the all-too-common generational mindset that sees “values young people as a resource” (as a ad in heavy-rotation at NPR proclaims). We are not a resource for extraction. Young people are too often seen merely as a source of cheap labor for projects initiated, designed and run by older Friends; they are wanted as passive audience members for older Friends’ pontificating lectures; they are endlessly proclaimed a far-off “future” of Friends rather than the very much here-and-now present of Friends.While older Friends at the consultation felt strongly that young people should be tapped, Adult Young Friends had lukewarm interest in being tapped and high school Friends showed no interest whatsoever. While not all older Friends think of young Friends as “resources,” it’s a common-enough theme that we need to flag it as a part of the generational gap. I suspect that power issues will surface when Quaker institutions try to pull together projects that “tap” youth: twenty-something Friends are going to want more involvement in the design and operation of these projects than older Friends will be willing to give.Similarly, older Friends seem to be more interested that younger Friends attain “critical mass” at Quaker institutions like monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings. The phrasing of the question is a little ambiguous and I see two likely explanations. One is that younger Friends don’t feel they need critical mass to be involved in Quaker institutions and want integrated intergenerational participation rather than “AYF ghettos.” The other possibility (the scarier one) is that younger Friends simply aren’t as committed to Quaker institutions. I suspect the generational differences in responses are the result of both these factors, plus others perhaps.

Things no one particularly cared about:

• No one wants materials specifically designed for AYF. No one wants advertising programs. No one wants a database to help isolated Friends.
• An AYF traveling ministries was lukewarm, 4 YAF stars, 3 over-40. This surprises me.
• Any other patterns that should be lifted up?

Disclaimer
I should note that this was not a scientific survey. Though the organizers of the Consultation tried hard and the participants were surprisingly diverse for an collection like this, they weren’t representative. There were only four high school participants and I didn’t adjust their votes: “lukewarm” support from them should really be relabled “strong” support.

While this is a small sample size, this is one of the few recent surveys of it type in FGC Quakerism and it bears close study. It confirms a lot of what I’ve been saying all these years (yea!, I’m not crazy) and echoes what I hear a lot of high school and twenty-something Friends talking about. Take it for what its worth!

Related:

• I first wrote about the Youth Ministries Consulation in “It’s My Language Now”