appreciate

March 29: A Quaker Trans Day of Visibility Gathering

Martin Kelley — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:24:12 +0000

Ten authors featured in the March 2026 Friends Journal special issue on gender and sexual identities join trans and nonbinary moderators for facilitated conversation. Free and both online at at Swarthmore College. Learn more here.

I wrote the introductory column for this issue. Here’s a taste:

am grateful that both our religious society and wider culture have developed a greater understanding of the diversity of gender expressions. I appreciate an expanded vocabulary with which to include people. (Only ten years ago the singular “they” was still cautioned against in the Friends Journal style guide!) Change can be confusing and bewildering, but open conversations between Friends one-on-one and in settings like a clearness committee can help us understand one another in our longing to be known and loved.

You can read the whole issue on Friends Journal.

A Quaker Trans Day of Visibility Gathering: A free online & in person event for Friends

Becky Jones: Connecting Spirit to Spirit

Martin Kelley — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:54:00 +0000

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.

Full show notes for my interview can be found here.

Elizabeth Spiers on Early Blogging

Martin Kelley — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 17:54:28 +0000

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.

Requiem for Early Blogging

As part of Talking Points Memo’s 25th anniversary, I wrote an essay on early blogging, and what I…

Elizabeth Spiers

Reviving Queer Worship

Martin Kelley — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 20:14:48 +0000

In my latest author podcast interview, I talk with R.E. Martin and Jason A. Terry about the efforts to bring back worship focused specifically on the queer community to Friends Meeting of Washington (FMW). I especially appreciate the work of connecting with elders who participated in this worship in decades past—through the worst of the AIDS epidemic and through the struggle for growing acceptance of the 1990s.

You can watch the full episode of my talk with R.E. and Jason and read their article, “Advices and Que[e]ries: Chosen Family and Chosen Ancestors.”

The October issue of Friends Journal is specifically about affinity groups: how and why and when we might break off into worship groups that specifically include and exclude Friends. October authors Vanessa Julye and Curtis Spence are interviewed as part of this month’s Quakers Today podcast episode, “Quakers & Affinity Spaces: Finding Wholeness in a Separated World.”

Vegetarian Author John Robbins Dies at 77

Martin Kelley — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 18:54:42 +0000

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.

Risking Community

Martin Kelley — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 18:04:50 +0000

From Gregg Koselka, a post that rewards reading a few times: Risking Community

When I look around, there is still so much hurt that needs to be processed. There are still real differences in philosophy about how to build community. Some see how much needs to radically change so that those who have been marginalized can truly be safe and have agency, and so want to go slowly to build it correctly. Some see the damage having no community can bring, and want to do what they can to build something as safely as possible. I hate that these differences are still causing damage to our relationships and our communities. I don’t have a solution.

I appreciate the way he tries to understand the flip sides of community and institutionalism; perhaps schism could be seen as the moment they can no longer be negotiated. As pastor of one of the “most institutional of institutional churches for 15 years,” he was in the center of the centrifugal forces that tore apart both Northwest Yearly Meeting as a whole and indivisible Friends churches within it. From a distance of 3000 miles and 150 years of diverging Quaker history, I’m not in a position to say whether things could have gone differently or whether individuals always acted in their best ways but I can appreciate that it there must have been a lot of impossible choices and no-good answers as polarization gave way to disintegration.

Risking Community

On the Web: Where’s that Power of the Lord?

Martin Kelley — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 13:41:03 +0000

The new Quaker Life has an article by Charles W. Heavilin asking “Where’s the Power of the Lord Now?”:http://www.fum.org/QL/issues/0506/heaviland.htm
bq. In our postmodern, fragmented world, where now is the power of the Lord among Quakers? There is a vast divide between the accounts of early Friends and that of contemporary Friends. Most modern Quaker reporting is perfunctory — accounts with the spiritual quality of recipes in a cookbook. Conversations at Quaker gatherings now revolve around declining attendance or bleak assessments of the spiritual shallowness of society. Seldom, if ever, is there any mention of the power of the Lord.
Great stuff. He gets into the way our culture has negatively influenced Friends. After you read it check out “C Wess Daniel’s”:http://gatheringinlight.blogspot.com/2005/06/i‑appreciate-article-charles-has.html commentary on the article:
bq. Simply put, I think we need to learn the stories of the Quaker church once again, and begin to tell them, live them, and move forward in this tradition that has been past down to us as one that has been formed by the Spirit of Christ through such wonderful leaders as Fox, Fell, Barclay, Woolman, etc.

Nonviolence.org syndicated

Martin Kelley — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 10:40:29 +0000

A little bit of housekeeping: There have been a few behind-the-scene changes on the Nonviolence.org homepage this weekend. I’ve switched the blogging software over to Moveabletype.
The hard-core blog readers will appreciate that Nonviolence.org now has an syndicated news feed. That means that you can now read the homepage with software like Sharpreader, Newsgator, etc.
even the more-casual readers will appreciate that you can now comment directly on every article. There will be other subtler features added over time. Let me know if there are any problems.