As White searched for graveyard ledgers in the library — crammed with stuffed birds, clothing, shells and books — she came upon the skull. Her legs wobbled. And her stomach dropped. Arsenault-Cote offered advice and reassurance. “You’re out there looking for them, and now they’re showing themselves to you,” she told White. “He’s been waiting a long time.” Historically, Philadelphia Quakers were “inconsistent friends” to Indians, engaged in the same colonizing projects as other faiths while seeing themselves as uniquely able to educate natives.

Inconsistent is an apt word. Paula Palmer has been tracing the history of Quaker Indian Boarding Schools: high-minded enterprises that often forcably stripped heritage from their pupils in ways that were as culturally imperial as they were unaware.

Byberry Meeting dates to the 1690s and the meetinghouse grounds are full of abolitionist history. The skull was apparently dug up in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a nearby canal project and is thought to have come to the meetinghouse as part of a collection from a shuttered historical society. Its presence on the shelf represents the attitudes of Friends many decades ago who thought nothing of placing a Lenape skull in a case. There’s also the sad subtext that the meeting library is said to be so unused that most of the meeting’s contemporary members had no idea it was there. It’s a shame that it took an outside researcher to notice the skeletons in our display case.

https://www.philly.com/philly/news/483072571.html

I think it’s a good time to talk now about how Friends are organizing to unlearn and subvert institutional racism. It was an important issue before November–ongoing mass incarceration, Standing Rock, and the disenfranchisement of millions of African Americans was all taking place before the election. But with racial backlashes, talk of a religious or nationality-based registries, and the coziness of “alt-right” white nationalists with members of the Trump campaign it all seems time to go into overdrive.

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Google’s approach cleverly stitches together multiple photos. It uses a process much like their 360-degree photo app: you start with a overview photo. Once taken, you see four circles hovering to the sides of the picture. Move the camera to each and it takes more pictures. Once you’ve gone over all four circles, Google stitches these five photos together in such a way that there’s no perspective distortion.

What’s remarkable is the speed. I scanned 15 photos in while also making dinner for the kids. The dimensions of all looked good and the resolution looks about as good as the original. These are good results for something so easy.

Check out Google’s announcement blog post for details.

Now those journalists are looking back. One is Andrew Sullivan, most widely known as the former editor of New Republic and now the publisher of the independent online magazine The Dish. I find his recent “Never Forget That They Were All Wrong” thread profoundly frustrating. I’m glad he’s taking the time to double-guess himself, but the whole premise of the thread continues the dismissive attitude toward activists. Starting in 1995 I ran a website that acted as a publishing platform for much of the established peace movement. Yes, we were a collection of antiwar activists, but that doesn’t mean we were unable to use logic and apply critical thinking when the official assurances didn’t add up. I wrote weekly posts challenging New York Times reporter Judith Miller and the smoke-and-mirror shows of two administrations over a ten-year period. My essays were occasionally picked up by the national media—when they needed a counterpoint to pro-war editorials—but in general my pieces and those of the pacifist groups I published were dismissed.

When U.S. troops finally did invade Iraq in 2003, they encountered an Iraqi military that was almost completely incapacitated by years of U.N. sanctions. The much-hyped Republican Guard had tanks that had too many broken parts to run. Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological programs had been shut down over a decade earlier. The real lesson that we should take from the Iraq War was that the nonviolent methods of United Nations sanctions had worked. This isn’t a surprise for what we might call pragmatic pacifists. There’s a growing body of research arguing that nonviolent methods are often more effective than armed interventions (see for example, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, reviewed in the March Friends Journal (subscription required).

What if the U.S. had acknowledge there was no compelling evidence of WMDs and had simply ratcheted up the sanctions and let Iraq stew for another couple of years? Eventually a coup or Arab Spring would probably have rolled around. Imagine it. No insurgency. No Abu Ghraib. Maybe we’d even have an ally in Baghdad. The situations in places like Tehran, Damascus, Islamabad, and Ramallah would probably be fundamentally different right now. Antiwar activists were right in 2003. Why should journalists like Andrew Sullivan assume that this was an anomaly?

Here’s the example: a lot of my photo stream is endless pictures of cute kids. Facebook friends who have friended me for other topics have to wade through that collection. Some actually like them–our friendships aren’t single issue and they appreciate glimpses of the rest of my life. But with G+ it’s my job to figure out which issue friends might want to be kid picture friends. I don’t want to put them on a list they don’t like and essentially spam them. Is there any G+ features I might use?

Google+: View post on Google+

The homepage adapted into what is now a recognizable blog format on November 13, 1997 when I re-named the homepage “Nonviolence Web Upfront” and started posting links to interesting articles from Nonviolence.org member groups. In response to a comment the other day I wondered how that fit in with the evolution of blogging. I was shocked to learn from Wikipedia’s that the term “weblog” wasn’t coined until December of that year. I think is less a coincidence than a confirmation that many of us were trying to figure out a format for sharing the web with others.

The earliest edition stored on Archive.org is from December 4, 1997. It focused on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day. To give you an sense of the early independently-published articles, the January 2, 1998 edition included a guest piece by John Steitz, “Is the Nonviolence Web a Movement Half-Way House” that sounds eerily similar to recent discussions on Quaker Ranter.

Below is an excerpt from the email announcement for “Nonviolence Web Upfront” (typically for me, I sent it out after I had been running the new format for awhile):

NONVIOLENCE WEB NEWS, by Martin Kelley Week of December 29, 1997

CONTENTS

Introducing “Nonviolence Web Upfront”

New Procedures
New Website #1: SERPAJ
New Website #2: Stop the Cassini Flyby
Two Awards
Numbers Available Upon Request
Weekly Visitor Counts

With my travelling and holiday schedule, it’s been hard to keep regular NVWeb News updates coming along, but it’s been a great month and there’s a lot. I’m especially proud of the continuing evolution of what I’m now calling “Nonviolence Web Upfront,” seen by 1800–2200 people a month!

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INTRODUCING “NONVIOLENCE WEB UPFRONT”

The new magazine format of the NVWeb’s homepage has been needing a name. It needed to mentioned the “Nonviolence Web” and I wanted it to imply that it was the site’s homepage (sometimes referred to as a “frontpage”) and that it contained material taken from the sites of the NVWeb.

So the name is “Nonviolence Web Upfront” and a trip to http://www.nonviolence.org will see that spelled out big on top of the weekly-updated articles.

There’s also an archive of the weekly installments found at the bottom of NVWeb Upfront. It’s quite a good collection already!

Now that this is moving forward, I encourage everyone to think about how they might contribute articles. If you write an interesting opinion piece, essay, or story that you think would fit, send it along to me. For example, “War Toys: Re-Action-ist Figures” FOR’s Vincent Romano’s piece from the Nov. 27 edition, was an essay he had already written and made a good complimentary piece for the YouthPeace Week special. But don’t worry about themes: NVWeb Upfront is meant not only to be timely but to show the breadth of the nonviolence movement, so send your pieces along!

As of late, I’ve been led to consider my outward appearance and how I choose to dress. Without elaborating on that leading in this posting (perhaps later), I have given much thought to clothing and dress generally. How we dress communicates a great deal to others about ourselves—whether or not it’s our intention.

The vain among us put a great deal of emphasis on our clothes and obsess about what it may say to others about our physical or social traits: “Am I hot, or am I not? Do I look smart with these glasses? Do these pants make my butt look big?” The secretly vain (perhaps everyone else) tend to avoid the topic lest they might have to inwardly admit that they are in the former category. Even if we tell ourselves that we don’t mean to communicate much of anything by our attire, it’s certainly true that others understand our clothes to be saying something about us. Let us begin the conversation there to avoid determining whether we are outright vain or just secretly vain. 🙂

Clothing communicates many things about us including perceptions of age, sex, class, and wealth. Clothing can stereotype us as urban or rural; cool or uncool (a subjective measure, of course); hip or hopelessly out of fashion. Some examples: when I wear my best suit to work, I sense that I get a higher level of respect than when I dress more casually. When I go out for a night on the town, I pick my “New York” shoes to convey a certain cosmopolitan image. Also, when I wear my coat collar standing up, it says something different than when I wear my collar flat. In what instances do you dress differently to emphasize a different part of yourself?

On evenings and weekends, I tend to wear the same clothes: a logo-free long-sleeve shirt, corduroy pants and a pair of retro-like sneakers. I do it because it’s comfortable and it’s easy; I always know what to wear, and I get to avoid the dreaded deed of shopping—something I really dislike. (It also means that I do laundry more often!)

Even though I tend to wear that same set of clothes outside of work, that decision says more than that I simply don’t care that my clothes are always the same. The outfit communicates a great deal more: One is just as likely to see a man wearing cords, retro sneakers and a logo-free long-sleeve shirt as one is a woman. Perhaps my clothes communicate androgyny. Maybe they say that I’m an urban dweller—a little bit of a hipster, but not too much. Perhaps they say that I’m cheap. Whatever they communicate, I think it’s fair to say that they say something to others. Once I admit that my clothes indeed say something, I can get past my discomfort (I must be secretly vain) and talk about it openly. Who is the person that I’m called to be and how am I outwardly led to embody those qualities? Through actions, yes, but through dress?

Plain dress, while a statement in and of itself, communicates faith, commitment to that faith, and Otherness. It set a person apart differently than other forms of dress. When prompted by an inner spiritual leading, plain dress isn’t simply the other side of the “cool coin.” It doesn’t vary by day or circumstance, and to some, plain dress is rather ugly. However, plain dress stands for something much different than a rejection of our cultural ideals of beauty and virility. It is an embrace of one’s inner spirit and making that spirit and that faith an outward symbol.

To me, plain dress would serve as a daily reminder of a commitment to lead a more Christian and Quaker life. If I were to dress plain, I would have to sacrifice my coolness (for lack of a better word) and wear plain, and rather unexciting clothes. I wouldn’t have the luxury of dressing for different audiences and circumstances depending on my motivations. In essence, I would outwardly communicate that I am a Quaker first, a person living each moment in the spirit and in the Light, and everything else second. Plain dress would serve as a reminder to me and others that I aspire to live toward God and in the footsteps of Jesus in all places, at all times, and in every circumstance.

What an empowering thought! It is a tremendous leading for anyone to hear and one worth seeking greater discernment.