date - Quaker Ranter

Cool historical find of the day

Martin Kelley — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 12:29:33 +0000

This is totally cool. The Historic Charleston Foundati on in South Carolina is restoring the Nathanial Russell House, a remarkable example of neoclassical architecture on the National Historic Register, and found a fragment what they list as 1868 Friends Intelligencer above the kitchen firebox.

More fascinating discoveries from the walls of the #russellhousekitchen – new artifacts were extracted from cavities above the kitchen firebox on the first floor! This latest batch of artifacts dates to the 1850’s and 1860’s, which I think we can agree is an interesting and… fractious time in Charleston’s history. The most intriguing scrap of paper recovered from the walls is pictured here: a page ripped from a Quaker periodical entitled “Friends’ Intelligencer,” published in Philadelphia in 1868.

Who were the Friends in Charleston in the years right after the Civil War? Was the Intelligencer hidden or just recycled to plug up a draft? I wonder if this could be related to Quaker relief work in South Carolina. The most well-known example was the Penn School on St Helena Island, founded by northern Unitarians and Quakers in 1862 to educate freed Gullah after the slaveowners fled Union troops.

Curious about the fragment, I typed a few of its legible words into Google and sure enough, they’ve scanned that volume of the Intelligencer (hattip to my FJ colleague Gail, who found this link). It shows a date of Fourth Month 20, 1868, though curiously FI also republished it in 1874, which I first found. The poem is credited to Bessie Charles, the English poet also credited as Elizabeth Bundle Charles; it seems to have been published in various collections around that time. The Intelligencer continues today of course.

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I’m not the only one who digs archives

Martin Kelley — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 18:28:15 +0000

Philadelphia Friends are so modest that blog posts on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s website don’t even have bylines. Or maybe someone forgot to fill out a field. Either way, here’s a first-person account by an anonymous Philadelphia-area Friend in their early 60s who started reading Friends Journal archives: Some Thoughts from the 1955 Friends Journal

I selected the issue closest to my birth date and began reading. The discussion of the Korean conflict, of the arms race, of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, could all have been written today. And for a lunch-time meditation, this article, on preparing for meeting, was just the right size for reading over my soup and sandwich.

Sectarian Symptoms: Jumpers, Shakers, Quakers, and…

Martin Kelley — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 20:57:41 +0000

Sectarian Symptoms: Jumpers, Shakers, Quakers, and Millenarians.

No date. Via the Viz blog and before that the Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections.

Are We More Than Our Demographics?

Martin Kelley — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:46:47 +0000

One of the things that is intriguing me lately is the nature of Quaker debate. There are half a dozen seemingly-perennial political issues around which Friends in my circles have very strong opinions (these include abortion, nuclear power, and the role of Friends in the troubles of Israel/Palestine) . We often justify our positions with appeals to our Quaker faith, but I wonder how often our opinions could be more accurately predicted by our demographic profile?

How many of your political positions and social attitudes could be accurately guessed by a savvy demographer who knew your date of birth, postal code, education and family income? I’d guess each of us are far more predictable than we’d like to think.If true, then what role does our religious life actually play?

Religious beliefs are also a demographic category, granted, but if they only confirm positions that could be just as actually predicted by non-spiritual data, then doesn’t that imply that we’ve simply found (or remained in) a religious community that confirms our pre-existing biases? Have we created a faith in our own image? And if true, is it really fair to justify ourselves based on appeals to Quaker values?

The “political” Quaker writings I’m finding most interesting (because they’re least predictable) are the ones that stop to ask how Quaker discernment fits into the debate. Discernment: one could easily argue that Quaker openings and tools around it are one of our greatest gifts to human spirituality. When we build a worship community based on strict adherence to the immediate prompting of the Holy Spirit, the first question becomes figuring out what is of-God and what is not. Is James Nayler, riding Jesus-like into Bristol, a prophet or a nut?

When we go deep into the questions, we may find that the answers are less important than the care we take to reach them. Waiting for one another, holding one another’s hand in love despite differences of opinion, can be more important than being the right-answer early adopter. How do you step back from easy answers to the thorny questions? How do you poll yourself and that-of-God in yourself to open your eyes and ears for the potential of surprise?

Bible Illiterate No More

Martin Kelley — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:36:52 +0000

A bit of a milestone–I finished the One Year Bible reading plan last night! I managed to stretch it out to 27 months but that’s alright. I started in January 2009 and initially kept the daily readings going till May of that year, when I feel hopelessly behind. I kept a mental note of the date and in May 2010 I started where I had left off. I kept reading regularly until the last week in December, when I was understandably distracted by the birth of our third son Gregory on 12/28. Knowing I wanted to keep the cycle going, I skipped that week and started again on January 1, 2011. It was only last night that I went back and finished up that last week–featuring Malachi and Revelations (which has the Lamb’s War metaphor so important to early Friends).

Thanks go to Gregg Kosela and AJ Schwanz for letting me know such a thing as one year Bible reading plans existed. I had never been able to stick to a regular Bible-reading regimen before. The grandmother who frequently declared me a Bible illiterate would be so proud! (Actually not, she’d find something else to critique, but her hangups around family and “Christian” living are a much longer blog post!).

It’s been great having a regular spiritual practice. I’m glad I can find my way around the Bible now and my understanding of Friends has deepened. The early Quaker writings are steeped in Biblical allusions and we miss a lot when we miss those references.

Working with Pipes #2: A DIY personalized community with Del.icio.us, Flickr and Google Blog Search

Martin Kelley — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 02:45:14 +0000

It’s
not necessary to develop your own Web 2.0 software infrastructure to
create an independent Web 2.0‑powered community online. It’s far
simpler to set a standard for your community to use on exisiting
networks and then to use Yahoo Pipes to pull it together.

I decided on about a dozen categories to use with my DIY blog aggregator (QuakerQuaker).
I only want to pull in posts that are being generated for my site by
community members so we use a community identifier, a unique prefix
that isn’t likely to be used by others.

This post will show you how to pull in tagged feeds from three sources: the Del.icio.us social bookmarking system, the Flickr photo sharing site and Google Blog Search.

Step 1: Pick a community designator

I’ve been using the community name followed by a dot. The prefix
goes in front of category description to make a set of unique tags for
the aggregator. When someone wants to add something for the site they
tag it with this “community.category” tag. In my example, when someone
wants to list a new Quaker blog they use “quaker.blog”, “quaker” being
the community name, “blog” being the category name for the “New Blogs”
page.

Step 2: Collect the community prefix and category name in Pipes

You begin by going into Pipes and pulling over two text inputs: one for
the community prefix, the other for the specific category.

Step 3: Construct these into tags

Now use the “String Concatenation” module to turn this into the
“community.category” model. The community input goes into the top slot,
a dot is the second slot and the category input goes into the last slot.

Now, when you have a tag in Flickr with a dot in it, Flickr automatically removes it in the resultant RSS feed.
So with Flickr you want your tag to be “communitycategory” without a
dot. Simple enough: just pull another “String Concatenation” module
onto your Pipes work space. It should look the same except that it
won’t have the middle slot with the dot.

Step 4: Turn these tags into RSS URLs

Pull three “URLBuilder” modules into Pipes, one for each of the
services we’re going to query. For the Base, use the non-tag specific
part of the URL that each service uses for its RSS feeds. Here they are:

Del.icio.us	http://del.icio.us/rss/tag
Flickr	http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds
Google Blog Search	http://blogsearch.google.com

Under path elements, put the correct tag: for Del.icio.us and Google it should be the community.category tag, for Flickr the dot-less communitycategory tag.

Step 5: Fetch and Dedupe

Fetch is the Pipes module that pulls in URLs and outputs RSS feeds. It can also combine them. Send each URLBuilder output into the same Fetch routine.

Since it’s possible that you’ll might have duplicate posts, use the “Unique” module to deduplicate entries by URL.
Through a little trial and error I’ve determined that in cases of
duplicates, feeds lower in the Fetch list trump those higher. In the
actual Pipe powering my aggregator I pull a second Del.icio.us feed: my
own. I have that as the last entry in the Fetch list so that I can
personally override every other input.

Step 6: Sort by Date

With experimentation it seems like Pipes orders the output entries by
descending date, which is probably what you want. But I want to show
how Pipes can work with “dc” data, the “Dublin Core” model that allows
you to extend standard RSS feeds (see yesterday’s post for more on this).

Google Blog Search and Del.icio.us feeds use the “dc:date” field to
record the time when the post was made. Flickr uses “dc:date.Taken” to
pass on the photograph’s metadata about when it was taken. Pipes’
“Rename” module lets you copy both fields into one you create (I’ve
simply used “date”), which you can then run through its “Sort” module.
Again, it’s a moot point since Pipes seems to do this automatically.
But it’s good to know how to manipulate and rename “dc” data if only
because many PHP parsers have trouble laying it out on a webpage.

Update: it’s all moot: according to a ZDNet blog, “Pipes now automatically appends a pubDate tag to any RSS feed that has any of the other allowable date tags.” This is nice: no need to hack the date every time you want to make a Pipe!

Step 7: Output

The final step for any Pipe is the “Pipe Output” module.

In action

You can see this published Pipe here, and copy and play with it yourself. The result lets you build an RSS feed based on the two inputs.

Katrina bin Laden and Our Public Enemies

Martin Kelley — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 16:25:16 +0000

We now know that while Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein didn’t conspire together, they did have one thing in common: their power was funded by our dependence on their oil. But even as Saddam’s show trial begins, televisions are watching America’s new national security enemies: Katrina and Wilma. Al Qaida’s 9/11 attacks and the Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship were “powered by” oil industry fortunes and short-sighted global energy policies, the same policies now bringing us global warming and monster storms.
Before making landfall in Mexico’s Yucatan and pounding Florida, Hurricane Wilma was declared the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in history. That we got to a W‑name itself is cause for concern: the first tropical storm of the year gets a name starting with “A” and so forth through the alphabet. This summer has been the “most active hurricane season”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Atlantic_hurricane_season since record-keeping started 150 years ago. We’ve seen so many storms that weather officials have now run through the alphabet: meteorologists are now having to track Tropical Storm (now Depression) Alpha 350 miles north of the Bahamas. In 2004, “five devastating hurricanes ripped across Florida”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Atlantic_hurricane_season, each one coming so fast on the heels of the last that few of us could even name them a year later. As I write, Wilma is pounding Western Florida, one of the fast-growing regions in the country. And of course Katrina devasted New Orleans and the Gulf Coast just two months ago.
Global climate change is here. After decades of political hemming and hawing, only the most slimy of oil industry apologists (and Presidents) could argue that global warming hasn’t arrived. We’ve built a national culture built on inefficient burning of fossil fuels. Developers put more and more people on unprotected sandbars built, maintained and insured by tax dollars. Someday is here and our weather is only going to be getting worse. We could be preparing for the inevitable adjustments. We could be investing in conservation, in renewable energies. We could change our tax codes to encourage sustainable housing: not just getting new development off beaches but also building urban and semi-urban communities that reduce automobile dependence.
Instead we spend billions of dollars on our oil addictions. We’re now waiting for the “announcement of the 2,000th U.S. military casualty in iraq”:http://www.afsc.org/2000/. Administration officials used Katrina to rollback environmental protection regulations in Louisiana. The arctic ice cap is rapidly melting away (the North Pole is now ice-free for part of the year) but oil industry officials point to the good news that we will soon be able to put “year-round oil rigs in the ice-free seas there”:http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1010–07.htm.
How many Katrina bin Laden’s and Saddam Wilma’s does it take before we get the news.