I had the pleasure of an author chat with Jeff Perkins, executive director of Friends Fiduciary Corporation, the organization that provides financial services to Quaker meetings and is on the forefront of socially responsible investment. We talked about the kind of activism that happens on investor conference calls. Jeff’s article, Main Street Activism and Wall Street Advocacy: Strange Bedfellows?, appears in the June/July issue of Friends Journal.

This weekend we’ve had a museum parked in our driveway. It’s the “BUS-eum” from the Traces Center for History and Culture in St. Paul, hosting a traveling exhibit on German POW’s in the US during World War II. We were happy to host the BUS-eum’s Irving Kellman over the weekend in-between stops in Cape May Courthouse and Vineland.  I asked him to give us the story of the German POWs on video.

As you might guess, there was a lot of Quaker connections in the 1940, with American Friends Service Committee involvement. Traces’ director Michael Luick-Thrams is a Friend and did his PhD thesis on the Scattergood Hostel, a refugee camp set up at the then-abandoned Friends school in Iowa. Many of the BUS-eum’s stops are Friends Schools, with public libraries being another common destination.

The visit was made with help from FGC’s Directory of Traveling Friends. I think this is the first time we’ve actually had a visitor after a decade of being listed there (most past inquiries have fallen through when they looked at a map and realized our distance from Pendle Hill, New York City or whatever other destination brought them east).

“Every religious group has a major challenge on its hands from all directions,” says [Pew Forum director Luis] Lugo. When he factors in Pew’s February findings that 44% of adults say they’ve switched to another religion or none at all, Lugo says, “You have to wonder: How do you guarantee the integrity of a religious tradition when so many people are coming or going or following ideas that don’t match up?”

Lugo’s questions is particularly relevant for Friends, as many of us are converts. But the general turn toward a more experiential religiosity points to possibilities for further outreach. Don’t have the time to check the survey itself but USAToday looks to have some good graphs about it.

When four Christian Peacemakers were taken hostage in Iraq late last November, a lot of Quaker organizations stumbled in their response. With Tom Fox we were confronted by a full-on liberal Quaker Christian witness against war, yet who stepped up to explain this modern-day prophetic witness? AFSC? FCNL? FGC? Nope, nope and nope. There were too many organizations that couldn’t manage anything beyond the boilerplate social justice press release. I held my tongue while the hostages were still in captivity but throughout the ordeal I was mad at the exposed fracture lines between religious witness and social activism.

Whenever a situation involving international issues of peace and witness happens, the Quaker institutions I’m closest to automatically defer to the more political Quaker organizations: for example, the head of Friends General Conference told staff to direct outsiders inquiring about Tom Fox to AFSC even though Fox had been an active leader of FGC-sponsored events and was well known as a committed volunteer. The American Friends Service Committee and Friends Committee on National Legislation have knowledgeable and committed staff, but their institutional culture doesn’t allow them to talk Quakerism except to say we’re a nice bunch of social-justice-loving people. I appreciate that these organizations have a strong, vital identity, and I accept that within those confines they do important work and employ many faithful Friends. It’s just that they lack the language to explain why a grocery store employee with a love of youth religious education would go unarmed to Badgdad in the name of Christian witness.

The wider blogosphere was totally abuzz with news of Christian Peacemaker Team hostages (Google blogsearch lists over 6000 posts on the topic). There were hundreds of posts and comments, including long discussions on the biggest (and most right-leaning) sites. Almost everyone wondered why the CPT workers were there, and while the opinions weren’t always friendly (the hostages were often painted as naive idealists or disingenuous terrorist sympathizers), even the doubters were motivated by a profound curiosity and desire to understand.

The CPT hostages were the talk of the blogosphere, yet where could we find a Quaker response and explanation? The AFSC responded by publicizing the statements of moderate Muslim leaders (calling for the hostages’ release; I emailed back a suggestion about listing Quaker responses but never got a reply). Friends United Meeting put together a nice enough what-you-can-do page that was targeted toward Friends. The CPT site was full of information of course, and there were plenty of stories on the lefty-leaning sites like electroniciraq.net and the UK site Ekklesia. But Friends explaining this to the world?

The Quaker bloggers did their part. On December 2 I quickly re-jiggered the technology behind QuakerQuaker.org to provide a Christian Peacemaker watch on both Nonviolence.org and QuakerQuaker (same listings, merely rebranded for slightly-separate audiences, announced on the post It’s Witness Time). These pages got lots of views over the course of the hostage situation and included many posts from the Quaker blogger community that had recently congealed.

But here’s the interesting part: I was able to do this only because there was an active Quaker blogging community. We already had gathered together as a group of Friends who were willing to write about spirituality and witness. Our conversations had been small and intimate but now we were ready to speak to the world. I sometimes get painted as some sort of fundamentalist Quaker, but the truth is that I’ve wanted to build a community that would wrestle with these issues, figuring the wrestling was more important than the language of the answers. I had already thought about how to encourage bloggers and knit a blogging community together and was able to use these techniques to quickly build a Quaker CPT response.

Two other Quakers who went out of their way to explain the story of Tom Fox: his personal friends John Stephens and Chuck Fager. Their Freethecaptivesnow.org site was put together impressively fast and contained a lot of good links to news, resources and commentary. But like me, they were over-worked bloggers doing this in their non-existant spare time (Chuck is director of Quaker House but he never said this was part of the work).

After an initial few quiet days, Tom’s meeting Langley Hill put together a great website of links and news. That makes it the only official Quaker organization that pulled together a sustained campaign to support Tom Fox.

Lessons?

So what’s up with all this? Should we be happy that all this good work happened by volunteers? Johan Maurer has a very interesting post, “Are Quakers Marginal?” that points to my earlier comment on the Christian Peacemakers and doubts whether our avoidance of “hireling priests” has given us a more effective voice. Let’s remember that institutional Quakerism began as support of members in jail for their religious witness; among our earliest committee gatherings were meetings for sufferings—business meetings focused on publicizing the plight of the jailed and support the family and meetings left behind.

I never met Tom Fox but it’s clear to me that he was an exceptional Friend. He was able to bridge the all-too-common divide between Quaker faith and social action. Tom was a healer, a witness not just to Iraqis but to Friends. But I wonder if it was this very wholeness that made his work hard to categorize and support. Did he simply fall through the institutional cracks? When you play baseball on a disorganized team you miss a lot of easy catches simply because all the outfielders think the next guy is going to go for the ball. Is that what happened? And is this what would happen again?

I keep reading inflammatory pieces about Mel Gibson’s movie _The Passion of Christ._ The basic gist is that anyone who focuses on the suffering of Jesus’s last days is inherently anti-Semitic. Because medieval passion plays stirred up anti-Semitism, all good Christians should stay away from the story and should stay away from Gibson’s movie.
I haven’t seen the movie (update: yes I have, see below), but I find it hard to imagine that there’s any anti-Semitism in it that matches the anti-Catholicism of Gibson’s detractors. To focus on Christ’s sufferings is to explain one of the most important metaphors of Christianity, especially of Roman Catholicism. I went to a Catholic college where every room had a crucifix–Jesus nailed to the cross. It was very different from the empty crosses I had always seen growing up as a pseudo-Protestant, but this difference is an important difference of focus between Catholics and Protestants. Is the most iconic act of Jesus his suffering for our sins (his time on the cross) or his resurrection (his disappearance from the cross)? As a good Catholic, Gibson is going to focus on the torture, on the pain, on the cruelty and on the suffering and to imply that he’s doing so just to shock is to miss the whole point. It is the very gruesomeness that makes the sacrifice so meaningful and it is the horror that makes the resurrection even more of miracle.
While we need to be aware of anti-Semitism we also need to be aware of this country’s history of anti-Catholicism. My alma mater is situated twelve miles outside Philadelphia because its first home was burned to the ground by anti-Catholic rioters (of course the Irish Catholics killed, looted and burned out African Americans in New York City a generation later). My Italian wife is related to Aunt Jemima (I kid you not) because in the 1920s Italians were considered half-black (and presumably because white audiences preferred a half-black performer to an all-black one). Lots of the anti-prohibition societies and reform societies of the early 20th century were fueled in part by an abhorrence of the garlic-eating immigrant mobs with their too-colorful clothing and their religious obsession with suffering and iconic excess. Much of this WASPy distaste and aloofness lingers in the anti-Gibson pieces.
It’s all a shame. This is just a movie folks. But because it’s become so polarized we can’t talk about it without taking sides. And the sides have nothing to do with the movie itself or its merits or detractions, but are instead positions in a proxy cultural war about religion. A recent piece by one prominent religious essayist argued that good Christians don’t focus on Christ’s suffering. For the last fifty years liberal Christians have focused on the positives, on that empty cross, and Gibson’s movie is a challenge to that. It’s a challenge that reminds liberals that suffering is also a central part of the story. For those who would demote Jesus to a merely human teacher, on the scale of Abraham Lincoln, _The Passion of Christ_ is a reminder that for many Christians the suffering and miracles of his life is quite beyond anything else in that has ever happened in human history.
This movie is a challenge for many modern Quakers. Most of the rich metaphors of co-mingled joy and suffering of the early Friends have been dumbed-down over the centuries to become little more than feel-good cliches. Today we talk of “The Light” as if it’s some sort of ultraviolet grow lamp helping us to become nice big plants. That’s a nice image and George Fox might have appreciated it. But Fox’s “Light of Christ” was also the harsh light of the interrogation room, a light that banished shadows to expose our sins and human failings. It was only after the light had “convicted” us (and that was the terminology) and only after we had given up our human follies to walk only in its power that we would find Christ’s comfort. And that comfort would often be in the midst of our suffering in imitation of Christ, in our persecution by those who would call themselves Christian.
Friends burst onto the scene in seventeenth century England with a radical message: that Christianity had been stolen to serve the power of the state and that only by restoring primitive Christianity could we truly follow God. Today that’s a challenge to both left and right: to those who will use Gibson’s movie as a banner to reinforce their cultural bigotries. On the right, some will surely use _The Passion_ to justify their anti-Semitism. On the left, I see many op-ed writers using it to justify their distaste for anyone who takes their Christian faith too seriously. Mel Gibson is making a movie about his belief. He claims that it’s not anti-Semitic and I’m inclined to believe him, that any bigotry we will see there is conditioned by our gruesome history and not by a deliberate act on Gibson’s part. Why can’t we just accept a believer believing? And why can’t we just watch the movie before arguing about it?
The heart of this debate is this: is Christianity so defiled by centuries of those wrongly tortured in its name that any honest expression of it is bigoted? There are many who will answer on both sides of that question. But Friends are a people born in a time of much wrongful persecution and so for us the answer is actually kind of easy: Christianity has been stolen time and again but we must constantly try to recover it. We do that by telling stories and reaffirming the truths we have no matter who’s critiquing us. We need to engage with our history and with each other. We are often put into a �uncomfortable middle� when we affirm the truths arising out of our peace testimony (opposing a war while still denouncing a dictator) and it seems to me we should have a similar attitude towards Christianity’s past.
Does Mel Gibson cross the line into bigotry? I haven�t seen the movie but I doubt it. All the op-eds against him have argued guilt-by-association and some of the charges against the “cult” or “sect” of traditionalist Catholics are so laughable that it’s pathetic to see them repeated on respected news programs. Gibson is a talented storyteller, one who will choose drama over sensitivity. He�s not averse to pandering to stereotypes to rouse an audience. He�s not a Quaker, that�s for sure. But he is a sincere believer telling a story about his faith. We need more of those. Let�s not picket and boycott someone simply for telling a story that doesn�t fit with the pieties of the modern liberal orthodoxy. Let�s return to that uncomfortable place where we can acknowledge the complexities of being fervently religious in a world haunted by past sins and still in need of conviction and comfort.

h3. Update 3/1: Having Seen the Movie
I’ve seen the movie now. It wasn’t as terrifying as I had feared. As a director, Gibson provides cues as to when the squeamish should look away. About half a dozen times I anticipated a particularly gruesome image and was able to avert my eyes in time. He didn’t need to do this–he knows how to shock audiences and he does have a few moments where he springs us from our seats, but he does play nice and keeps the shocks and goryness separate.
Because the movie tells a familiar story and tries to portray it in realistic terms, it acts as a sort of blank slate ripe for the projection of individual audience members. How you see this movie depends in large part about what you bring to it. What you bring to it of course often depends on your feelings about Jesus Christ. More than any movie I can remember, you will see what you want to see in the film.
Take the famous scourging scene. My wife Julie winced at every bloody lash, but she did so because she understood the Catholic teaching that each strike represented her own sins.
I didn’t take it that way. As an anarchist and Christian pacifist I was struck anew with the impossibility of supporting empire in the name of this man. Our temples have been rent asunder and reborn in the Spirit. We are the lamb’s warriors. If even Jesus didn’t save himself from this torture how can we? For me, the Roman warlords were clearly the American generals in Iraq and Pontius Pilate’s sacrificing of a Jewish prophet to keep civil order too reminiscent of “US occupying forces giving jobs to ex-Saddam security forces”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000206.php to do the same thing. To be honest, the high Jewish priests all looked like Catholic bishops to me–I kept seeing Boston’s former Cardinal Bernard F. Law, a man who cared more about keeping his church out of scandal then he did the innocent children being molested by abusive priests. The message for me was that leaders will always be tempted to sacrifice the truth to protect the vanity of their institutional power. As Fox said:
bq. “When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, ‘�There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.’ ”
Now, I can pretty sure that Mel Gibson doesn’t share my anarcho-pacifist politics or George Fox’s theologies (update: or can I be? See below for a link to an interview with the Jewish Romainan actress who plays Mary and explains the film in fairly political terms). And that’s the most interesting thing about this movie. I’m sure an anti-Semite will find reasons to be anti-Semitic. Someone angry at Christianity will find reasons to be angry. It seems as if just about ever movie reviewer I read must have seen a different movie, and I think there’s a kernel of truth in that. I wonder if this is a result of it being such a loaded story worn rigid by two thousand years of retelling for such different agendas or whether it’s a result of Gibson’s relatively radical filming decisions? I kept wondering what it would have been like if Gibson had followed through on his original concept and omitted even the subtitles?
A few friends of mine have been emailing back and forth, noting that they would be scared of anyone converted to Christianity by this movie. I barely see how that’s possible. Without the context of belief, this is just a story about some guy being tortured to death. (There were only two miracles, touched at briefly: a reattachment of a Roman solider’s ear and a brief, dream-like scene of the Resurrection. The latter reminded me most of ending in “Being There”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/ where the lucky simpleton played by Peter Sellers unexpected starts walking on water, tantalizing us that maybe he wasn’t quite so simple.) There are plenty of secular movies that have more miracles or more overt “Christ figures” than this one.
If there are any conversions it will be because of the activity _around_ the film.
The sad thing though, is that too many people have become divided on this film. Political correctness has settled in on both sides of political aisle. I lot of people I respect might have gone out to see this film had it been made by anyone but Mel Gibson and had it not been so denounced by the liberal media.
Because of this Martin Kelley Quaker Ranter website, I’ve been introduced to a much wider variety of Friends and fellow believers than I had before and it’s become harder to take seriously the institutional divisions we’ve erected. There’s a lot of sweet people among the big scary Evangelicals and a lot of deep thinking and concern deep in FUM-land. Likewise, non-Liberal Friends reading this site might realize that Liberal Quakers aren’t all the cartoonish stereotype we’re sometimes made out to be (fair disclosure: my wife Julie, the ex-Quaker, just read this sentence and laughed out “yes they are!”). The truth is beyond these divisions and it’s only when we break the ranks of our own orthodoxies that we will are really able to greet that of Christ/God/Spirit in each other. It’s fine to like or not to like _The Passion of the Christ_ but the biggest lesson the film might teach us is how to look beyond the pat answers to engage with each other and with our traditions.
h4. Other Stuff
* New Quaker Merle Harton Jr. wrote an interesting piece last year about “passion plays, anti-Semitism and the upcoming movie”:http://www.newQuaker.com/2003_08_17_blogarchive.htm#106116543162349803 and he has this piece “about seeing the movie”:http://newQuaker.com/2004_02_29_blogarchive.htm#107820009585274899.
* The Evangelical Friends at “Barclay Press”:http://www.barclaypress.com/ have a special feature on their website with reviews and reader’s comments.
* Whoa, apparently the cinematographer from the movie is Quaker!? Here’s an iinterview that “mentions he’s a Quaker”:http://starbulletin.com/2004/02/22/features/story4.html but doesn’t go into any depth. Link from Quakerinfo.com. Googling him he’s also described as a “Philadelphia-born Quaker,” which makes me wonder if he’s “ethnically” Quaker but not practicing. If anyone knows more I’d be interested.
* Talk about interesting casting: Mary is played by Maia Morgenstern , a Jewish Romanian whose parents are Holocaust survivors, who says of the film: “Again and again — I underline and underline this — it’s not the people who are blamed. It was some leaders. Unfortunately, we have so many examples — even now, every minute — of political, social, military, religious leaders who are dealing with our fears, with our hopes, who are trying to manipulate our ideas and our fears. And that film speaks about this.”
* Celebrity film critic Roger Ebert has an “interesting review”:http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/cst-ftr-passion24.html: “For we altar boys, [the Stations of the Cross] was not necessarily a deep spiritual experience. Christ suffered, Christ died, Christ rose again, we were redeemed, and let’s hope we can get home in time to watch the Illinois basketball game on TV. What Gibson has provided for me, for the first time in my life, is a visceral idea of what the Passion consisted of… This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it.”
* There is of course an official “Passion movie website”:http://www.thepassionofthechrist.com/.

One of my favorite sites is the amazing NJChurchscape.com—that’s New Jersey Churchscapes, put together largely through the efforts of Frank L. Greenagel. It’s a true labor of love, a cataloging of church and meeting architecture in New Jersey. It has beautiful photos, great stories, readable essays on architecture. In a state where everything below Cherry Hill often gets ignored, South Jersey gets good coverage and there’s a lot from the old Quaker colony of West Jersey. This month’s feature is on the meetinghouse, a building of endearing simplicity and it raises a lot of questions for me of how we relate to our church buildings.

We modern-day Friends tend to think of the term meetinghouse as uniquely ours, but go back in history and you’ll find just about everyone using the term to describe the non-showy buildings they erected for religious services and town life. Drive around South Jersey and you’ll see old Methodist churches that started out life as meetinghouses and look surprisingly Quaker. Greenagel looks at the style and then asks:

At what point does a structure cease being a meetinghouse and become a church?.. With the rising affluence and increased mobility of the population came a demand for more specialized places to meet, as well as more of the basic comforts and style which heretofore were dismissed as too worldly, so many churches added smaller lecture rooms, classrooms for Sunday school, and other assembly rooms distinct from the main auditorium.

By this measure, how many of our beloved East Coast Quaker meetinghouses should really just be called “churches?” In the nineteenth century the Protestant “Sunday School Movement” was picked up by Gurneyite and Progressive Hicksite Friends, with the classes simply renamed “First Day School” in deference to Quaker sensibilities (I’ve always wondered if the name switch actually fooled anyone, but that’s another story). By the twentieth century, the new modern liberal Friends had picked up the lecture format, which like the First Day School movement had been adopted from educational models via other religious groups. Many of our larger monthly meetings have fellowship halls, classrooms, kitchens, etc. These buildings have become specialized religious worship buildings and many of them sit empty for most of the week. But not all.

Nowadays many Quaker meetings with buildings open them mid-week for use by community groups. Quaker meetinghouses host peace groups, battered women hotlines, yoga classes, religious congregations in need of a temporary home and similar causes. There’s often an element of good works in the group’s charter.

Perhaps this willingness to open our buildings up earns us the right to continue using the meetinghouse name. If so, we should be careful to resist the pressure of the insurance industry to close ourselves up in the name of liability. One uniqueness to our worship spaces is that they are not consecrated and there should be no special rules for their use. They are oversized barns and we should cherish that. We should remember not to get fetishistic about their history and we shouldn’t tie up our business meetings in endless discussions over the color of the new seat cushions. When we turn our buildings over for others’ use, we shouldn’t worry overly much if a chair or clock gets damanged or stolen. Friends know that our religion is not our buildings and that the measure of our spirit is simply how far we’ll follow God, together as a people.

Related Reading:

• There’s a very handsome book about the HABS work on Quaker meetinghouses in the greater Philadelphia area called Silent Witness: Quaker Meeting Houses In The Delaware Valley, 1695 To The Present. (only $10!).
• My friend Bob Barnett has been putting a lot of great work into a new West Jersey website.

The piece speaks for itself but there is one point of context and a few observations to make. The first is that the grassroots culture I was thinking of when I wrote the piece was the “emergent church,” “young evangelical” movement. Thirty years ago the kids I’ve met at “Circle of Hope”, a Philadelphia “emergent church” loosely affiliated with the Brethren could easily have been at a Movement for New Society* training: the culture, the interests, the demographics are all strikingly similar.

(MNS was a national but West Philly-centered network of group houses, publications, and organizing that forged the identities of many of the twenty-somethings who participated; Nonviolence.org is arguably a third-generation descendant of MNS, via New Society Publishers where I worked for six years).

The observation for Friends is that retro-organizing like the relatively-new “Pendle Hill Peace Network” [website URL long since dropped & picked up by spammer] will have a really hard time acting as any sort of outreach project to twenty-somethings (a main goal according to a talk given my monthly meeting by its director). The grassroots peace-centric communities that were thriving when the Network sponsors were in their twenties don’t exist anymore. Rather predictably, the photographs of the next two dozen speakers for the Pendle Hill Peacebuilding Forum series show only one who might be under forty (maybe, and she’s from an exotic locale which is why she gets in). I’m glad that a generation of sixty-something Quaker activists are guaranteed steady employment, but don’t any Quaker institutions think there’s one American activist under forty worth listening to?

I think the best description of this phenomenon comes from the military. They call it “incestuous amplification” and define it as “a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lockstep agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation.” I suspect that peace activists are so worried about their own relevancy that they have a hard time recognizing new peers or changed circumstances.

These numbers and the lack of speaker diversity explain why I rarely even bother with Quaker peace conferences anymore. I wouldn’t mind being overlooked in my peace ministry if I saw other activists my age being recognized. But I can’t take my invisibility as feedback since it’s clearly not about me or my work. The homogeneity of the speakers lists at most conferences sends a clear message that younger people aren’t wanted except as passive audience members clapping for the inspiring fifty- to seventy-somethings on stage. How much of current retro peace organizing is just self-stroking Boomer fantasy?

The in-group incestuousness has created a generation gap of relevancy. When institutions and movements become myopic, they become irrelevant to those locked outside. We have to go elsewhere to build our identities.

The internet is one place to go. From there it’s clear that the institutional projects don’t have the “buzz,” i.e., the support and excitment, that the Gen-X-led projects do. The internet alone won’t save us: there’s only so much culture one can build online and computer-mediated discussions favor argumentation, rationality, and ideological correctness. But it’s one of the few venues open to outsiders without cash or institutional clout.

But what about the content of a twenty-first century twenty-something peace movement?

Many of today’s twenty-something Quakers were raised up as secular peace activists. Our religious education programs often de-emphasize controversial issues of faith and belief to focus on the peace testimony as the unifying Quaker value. Going to protests is literally part of the curriculum of many Young Friends programs. Even more of a problem, older Friends are often afraid to share their faith plainly and fully with younger Friends on a one-on-one basis. The practice of personal and Meeting-based spritual mentorship that once transmitted Friends values between generations is very under-utilized today.

Almost all of these Friends stop participating in Quakerism as they enter their twenties, coming back only occasionally for reunion-type gatherings. Many of these lapsed Friends are out exploring alternative spiritual traditions that more clearly articulate a faith that can give meaning and purpose to social action. I have friends in this lost Quaker generation that are going to Buddhist temples, practicing yoga spirituality, building sweat lodges and joining evangelical or Roman Catholic churches. Will they really be won back with another lecture series? What would happen if we Friends started articulating the deep faith roots of our own peace testimony? What if we started testifying to one another about that great Power that’s taken away occasion for war, what if our testimony became a witness to our faith?

Why are a lot of the more thoughtful under-40s going to alternative churches and what are they hoping to find there?

Don’t get me wrong: I hope these new peace initiatives do well and help to build a thriving twenty-something activist scene again. It’s just that for fifteen years I’ve seen a sucession of projects aimed at twenty-somethings come and go, failing to ignite sustaining interest. I worry that things won’t change until sponsoring organizations seriously start including younger people in the decision-making process from their inception and start recognizing that our focus might be radically different.

Postscript
I share some observations about the different way institutional and outsider Friends use the internet in How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net.

UPDATE: The Pendle Hill Peace Network was laid down in late 2005. The cited reason was “budgetary constraints,” an empty excuse that sidesteps any responsibility for examining vision, inclusion or implimentation. It’s forum is now an advertising stage for “free mature porn pics.” It’s very sad and there’s no joy in saying “I told you so.”

UPDATE: After twelve years I laid down Nonviolence.org and sold the domain. I never received any real support from Friends.