Yohannes “Knowledge” Johnson is a member of Bulls Head — Oswego Meeting even though he has never set foot in the meetinghouse. He hasn’t because he’s been a guest of the New York State prison system for almost forty years (murder and attempted murder in 1980). Johnson talks about how he centers and participates despite the walls and bars surrounding him:
Centering is always a welcome challenge, for, as one would expect, prison can be a noisy place and competing conversations can be overwhelming. What I do is draw myself into the pictures and focus upon the images and people therein. I have accompanying pictures of places visited by Friends and sent to me over the years with scenery that, for me as a person raised on the concrete pavements of New York City, gives me visions of natural beauty without the clutter of building structures and the like.
Is it time to give up various pacifist calls for religious liberty given the way the concept has been coopted by those trying to institutionalize discrimination?
At a time when the things that bind us together as a society are so fragile, I’m wary of efforts that smack of isolating oneself from the sins of the world, rather than building solidarity in hopes that, God willing, those sins might be overcome.
What are our truths? What do we believe as a community? What is our witness in the world today? How are we building the Beloved Kingdom here on Earth? Quakerism is not a do-it-yourself individualistic religion. If it is, why do we even come to Meeting for Worship anymore?
Though Traditional Quaker Christianity is intended to convey the tradition among Conservative Friends, it may find readers among Liberals and Evangelicals. Should another generation of Quakers come forth and undertake the restoration of “the desolations of many generations,” they could find this book a resource for building up a Quaker Christian society.
I must admit that after spending my work days reading manuscripts and my commutes reading blog posts, the enjoyment of books has gotten a bit squeezed out. This looks like a useful one to try to fit it. Friend Marty Grundy reviewed this title for Friends Journal a few years ago. After posting the link to Patricia’s post, Mackenzie reminded me that Quaker Faith and Podcast has also been going through the book in recent episodes.
It’s written for a tech audience and leans a bit on the dichotomy between old (“It still looks much the same as it did in 1670”) and modern communication but there are some insights that we Friends sometimes take too much for granted:
Social media tends towards the shallow and boastful. That’s not an intuitive fit for the meticulous work of ecumenical accompaniment, nor for a faith that values authenticity and depth. However, Teresa and her team know they need to do more — not despite their beliefs, but because of them.
I also appreciate the comparison between Quaker organization and principles of decentralization found in networks.
Just as in tech, decentralisation — building a more networked approach — is high on Quakers’ agenda. But that journey is perhaps easier for a faith fundamentally opposed to hierarchy. Now, rather than try to hang onto old models, Quakers in Britain are actively (and continuously) checking their power and privilege.
It profiles Henderson Luelling (1809 – 1878) and it’s not exactly an academic source. Here’s a snippet:
Luelling had taken up with these groovy Free Lovers, whom he met in San Francisco. From the outset, the journey had complications. “Dr.” Tyler, it turned out, was actually an ex-blacksmith who now professed expertise in water-cures and clairvoyance. One of the men was fleeing financial troubles, and when the ship was searched by police he hid under the hoopskirt of a female passenger.
Luelling’s life follows many common themes of mid-nineteenth century Quaker life:
He was a horticulturalist, first moving to the Portland, Oregon, area and then to a small town near Oakland, California. Friends had long been interested in botanical affairs. Roughly a century earlier John Bartram was considered one of the greatest botanists of his generation.
Luelling moved from Indiana to Salem, Iowa in the 1830s and became a staunch abolitionist, even building hideouts for the Underground Railroad in his house. Wikipedia reports he was expelled from his meeting for this.
He got Oregon fever and moved his operation out there.
At some point in this he became interested in Spiritualism and its offshoots like the Free Love movement. This was not a Quaker movement but the modern American movement started with the Fox Sisters in Upstate New York and was heavily promoted by Quaker Hicksites Amy and Isaac Post.
The “free love” thing is far from new. Over the years, especially in the American West, at least half a dozen generations have produced at least one “daring” philosopher who calls for a throwing-off of the age-old yoke of marriage and family and urges his or her followers to revert to the mythic “noble savage” life of naked and unashamed people gathering freely and openly, men and women, living and eating and sleeping together with no rules, no judgment and no squabbles over paternity.
He’d also started his very own free-love cult — “The Harmonial Brotherhood.” Luelling’s group made free love the centerpiece of a strict regimen of self-denial that included an all-vegetarian, stimulant-free diet, cold-water “hydropathy” for any medical need, and a Utopian all-property-in-common social structure.
Portland Friend Mitchel Santine Gould has written about some of these currents as well. His LeavesofGrass.org site used to have a ton of source material. Digging into one day it seemed pretty clear that the Free Love movement was also a refuge of sorts for those who didn’t fit strict nineteenth-century heterosexuality or gender norms. Gould’s piece, Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox has a bit of this, with talk of “lifelong bachelors.”
Many of the Spiritualist leaders were young women and their public lecture series were pretty much the only public lectures by young women anywhere in America. If you want to learn more about these developments I recommend Ann Braud’s Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. These communities were very involved in abolitionist and women’s rights issues and often started their own yearly meetings after becoming too radical for the Hicksites.
And lest we think all this was a West Coast phenomenon, my little unprepossessing South Jersey town of Hammonton was briefly a center of Free Love Spiritualism (almost completely scrubbed from our history books) and the nearby town of Egg Harbor City had extensive water sanitariums of the kind described in these articles.
This question is neither sarcastic nor rhetoric. As many people insist that violence and atrocities are an inherent part of religions, that religions would cause wars, I really want to know if that is the truth. Personally I believe religions can be peaceful, such as in the cases of the Quakers and the Baha’i, but I might be wrong.
The obvious answer should be “none.” Quakers are well-known as pacifists (fun fact: fake cannon used to deceive the enemy into thinking an army is more fortified than it actually is are called “Quaker guns.”) Individual Quakers have rarely been quite as united around the peace testimony as our reputation would suggest, but as a group it’s true we’ve never called for a war. I can’t think of any military skirmish or battle waged to rallying cries of “Remember the Quakers!”
Quaker guns at Manassas Junction, 1862. Via Wikimedia.
And yet: all of modern civilization has been shaped by war. Our political boundaries, our religions, our demographic make-up – even the languages we speak are all remnants of long-ago battles. One of the most influential Quaker thinkers, the eighteenth century minister John Woolman, constantly reminded his brethren to consider those luxuries that are the fruit of war and slavery. When we broaden the scope like this, we’ve been involved in quite a few wars.
We like to remember how William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania as a religious refuge. But the king of England held European title to the mid-Atlantic seaboard because of regional wars with the Dutch and Swedes (and later held onto it only after a much larger war with the Canadian French settlements).
The king’s grant of “Penn’s Woods” was the settlement of a very large war debt owed to Penn’s father, a wealthy admiral. The senior William Penn was something of a scoundrel, playing off both sides in ever-shifting royalist/Roundhead seesaw of power. When the musical chairs were over he was on the side of the winner, who owed him and later his son. The admiral’s longest-lasting accomplishment was disobeying orders and capturing Jamaica for the British (Bob Marley sang his songs of oppression and injustice in English because of Sir William).
By most accounts, William Penn the younger was fair and also bought the land from local Lenape nations. Mostly forgotten is that the Lenape and Susquehannock population had been devastated in a recent regional war against the Iroquois over access to beaver-trapping territories. They were now subject nations to the Iroquois Confederacy, which skillfully played global politics by keeping the English and French colonial empires in enough strategic tension that both left the Iroquois homeland alone. It was in the Iroquois’s best interest to have another British colony on their southern flank and who would make a better buffer than these idealistic pacifists? The Lenape land reimbursement was secondary consideration to continental politics from their perspective. (One could easily make a case that the biological genocide of indigenous America by diseases brought over by uncaring colonists was also a form of war.)
The thousands of acres Penn deeded to his fellow Quakers were thus the fruits of at least four sets of wars: colonial wars over European claims to the Delaware Valley; debt-fueled English civil wars; English wars against Spanish Caribbean colonies, and Native American wars fought over access to commercial resources. Much of original Quaker wealth in succeeding generations is indebted to the huge land transfer in the 1680s, either directly (we still hold some valuable real estate) or indirectly (the real estate’s sale could be funneled into promising businesses).
Not all of the fruits of war were secondhand and coincidental to Friends themselves. Many wealthy Friends in the mid-Atlantic colonies had slaves who did much of the backbreaking work of clearing fields and building houses. Many of those oppressed souls were put into bondage in Africa as prisoners of war (John Woolman would probably point out that slavery itself is a form of war). That quaint old brick meetinghouse set back on a flower-covered field? It was probably built at least in part by enslaved hands.
Today, it’s impossible to step free of war. Most of our houses are set on land once owned by others. Our computers and cell phones have components mined in war zones. Our lights and cars are powered by fossil fuels. And even with solar panels and electric cars, the infrastructure of the daily living of most Americans is still based on extraction and control of resources.
This is not to say we can’t continue to work for a world free of war. But it seems important to be clear-eyed and acknowledge the debts we have.
Twitter has always been a company that succeeds despite its leadership. Many of its landmark featured started as hacks by users. Its first apps were all created by third-party designers, whose good will to the curb when it about-faced and killed most of them by restricted its API. Top-down features like Twitter Music have come and gone. The only interesting grassroots innovation of recent years has been users using image attachments as a way of going past the 140 character limit.
I’ve been getting less patient with Twitter in recent months. Then-CEO Dick Costello acknowledged their failure handling abusive situations early in 2015 but nothing much seems to have changed. Having co-founder Jack Dorsey come back this in Jobsian fashion has been encouraging but only to a point — there’s a lot of weird ego involved in it all. Twitter’s inability to promote diversity and the tone-deafness of hiring a white man as diversity chief last month makes me wonder if it’s just finally going to do a full Yahoo and implode in slow motion.
But today something new: we’re looking at doing away with the 140 character limit. My initial reaction was horror but if done well it could be interesting. I’ve always wondered why they didn’t partner with blogging platform Medium (founded by another co-founder, featuring similar core principles). The key will be keeping the feed at 2 – 3 lines so we can scan it quickly, with some sort of button or link to expand past 140 or so characters.
One could argue that these “fatter tweets” is Twitter’s way of building the popular long-text picture hack into the system. Could Twitter management be ready to look at users as co-creators of the wider Twitter culture?
Friends Journal 
Medium 
