AFAIK - Quaker Ranter https://www.quakerranter.org A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley Fri, 31 May 2019 18:11:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://i0.wp.com/www.quakerranter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/cropped-qr-512.jpg?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 AFAIK - Quaker Ranter https://www.quakerranter.org 32 32 16720591 Twitter thread of the day https://www.quakerranter.org/twitter-thread-of-the-day/ https://www.quakerranter.org/twitter-thread-of-the-day/#respond Fri, 31 May 2019 16:58:50 +0000 https://www.quakerranter.org/?p=61784 So this happened:

So yeah, THAT Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’m going to have Moana songs in my head all day now. See the line where the sky meets THE sea? It calls ME, And no one KNOOOOOWWS, how far it GOOOEEES. (okay, it sounds better when my 8yo daughter sings along in the car).

Nicole Cliffe is a former atheist turned Christian (but AFAIK, not Quaker (yet)) who told her conversion story in Christianity Today a few years ago. One of her claims to fame is co-founding The Toast, which stop publishing in 2016 but still has someone paying for the web server.

And in case Lin-Manuel swings by, he should know that history geek Quaker hip hop is a thing.

]]> https://www.quakerranter.org/twitter-thread-of-the-day/feed/ 0 61784 President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminiary on Simon Jenkins article https://www.quakerranter.org/president-of-southern-baptist-theological-seminiary-on-simon-jenkins-article/ https://www.quakerranter.org/president-of-southern-baptist-theological-seminiary-on-simon-jenkins-article/#comments Tue, 15 May 2018 22:03:58 +0000 http://www.quakerranter.org/?p=60919 Chalk this one up as another whisper-down-the-lane. As readers will probably remember, a few weeks ago, non-Friend Simon Jenkins wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian about the possibility of British Friends dropping God from their Faith and Practice. There were a lot of exaggerations in it; the yearly meeting session was mostly deciding whether it it felt led to start the long process of revising the document of Friends’ belief and practice. Many yearly meetings do this every generation or so. AFAIK, there was no substantive discussion on what the revisions might bring. At the time, I speculated that “Jenkins is chasing the headline to advance his own argument without regard to how his statement might polarize Friends.”

Now we have another headline chaser. The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary more or less reads Jenkins’s piece aloud on his radio show (hat-tip havedanson on the Quakers subreddit). He lightly skips over the fact that Jenkins isn’t Quaker and admits to limited experience of Quaker worship. The SBTS president, Albert Mohler, repeatedly calls the Guardian article a “news report” even though it is clearly labeled as an opinion piece. If any publicity is good publicity then it’s good that non-Friends like Jenkins and now Mohler are talking about the decision-making process of a Quaker yearly meeting, but this is stupid piled on stupid.

From a media perspective, I get it: Mohler has a daily 24-minute podcast to fill. He has interns who scan buzzy news items. They rearrange the text with interstitials like “he continues, and I quote” and “he goes on to say” so that Mohler can spend five minutes reading an article without sounding like he’s just reading an article. But seriously, how does the president of a major seminary have such disregard for anything approaching academic rigor? Also: how much regurgitated junk is on the internet simply because people need to fill time? The Quaker caution about giving ministry just because you’re paid to give ministry and it’s time to give ministry seems apt in this case.

Monday, May 14, 2018

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