Another favorite is Jean Soderlund’s look at Lenape People, Quakers, and peace in the seventeenth century. I reached out to Jean after reading her 2015 book, Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn. On of her theses was that a lot of the culture of peace that we’ve attributed to Pennsylvania Quakers was already well in place along both shores of the Delaware River long before Penn’s arrival, negotiated by the Lenape who protected it through a succession of Dutch and Swedish settlements and governors. As I wrote in my opening column this month:

Friends have often spent a lot of time thinking about Quaker culture and justifying it to ourselves and others. Our histories and the stories we tell about ourselves have often been crafted to provide a unified vision for who we should be now. It’s a continual process, and storytelling continues to shape our self-image today.

“Who Do We Think We Are?”

I think a lot of what has become American Quaker culture was forged in the first fifty years of Philadelphia-area governing and that if we’re to understand who we are now, it helps to understand how a band of persecuted radicals in England adapted to becoming landowners, colonizers, and governors over a sometimes unwilling land of Lenape, Swedes, Dutch, Finns and non-Quaker English.

Probably not: there are many issues for which we only get submissions in the last week before deadline (or the week after deadline, which is not to be encouraged). But if you are thinking of writing, or have been meaning to encourage a friend with vision to send us something, then by all means sit down in front of a keyboard.

Also, the issue after that is non-themed. If you’ve ever had any questions for writing a general submission, let me know in the comments or direct message me. I’m writing something about that process this week.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.

I mention this toward the end of my review of The Burglary, the story of the 1971 antiwar activists, and it’s something I’ve been trying to pull from potential authors as we’ve put together an August Friends Journal issue on war. Much of the day-to-day mechanics of war has changed drastically in the past 40 years—at least for American soldiers.

We have stories like this one from the NYTimes: drone operators in suburban U.S. campuses killing people on the other side of the planet. But soldiers in Baghdad have good cell phone coverage, watch Netflix, and live in air conditioned barracks. The rise of contractors means that most of the grunt work of war—fixing trucks, peeling potatoes—is done by nearly invisible non-soldiers who are living in these war zones. It must be nice to have creature comforts but I’d imagine it could make for new problems psychologically integrating a war zone with normalcy.