Ashley Wilcox talk on Quakers and the prophetic tradition

April 12, 2019

From thr Guilfordian:

Wilcox began the dis­cus­sion with a ques­tion of whether or not the Guil­ford com­mu­ni­ty should seek out prophets and prophe­cies. Wilcox sought to relate this ques­tion to the Quak­er tradition.

“This talk is about prophets and prophe­cy,” Wilcox said. “So the first ques­tion is, ‘What does it mean to be a prophet?’ I don’t think Jere­mi­ah would rec­om­mend it.” 

https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.guilfordian.com/news/2019/04/12/wilcox-talks-quakerism-and-the-prophetic-tradition/&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjk1NzUwOWM3NjZmNTA4MzU6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AFQjCNGr3hjx9Dxd8r_5amP0l6AQfRXDcg

Facebook superposters and the loss of our own narrative

August 26, 2018

In the NYTimes, a fas­ci­nat­ing piece on fil­ter bub­bles and the abil­i­ty of Face­book “super­posters” to dom­i­nate feeds, dis­tort real­i­ty, and pro­mote para­noia and violence.

Super­posters tend to be “more opin­ion­at­ed, more extreme, more engaged, more every­thing,” said Andrew Guess, a Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty social sci­en­tist. When more casu­al users open Face­book, often what they see is a world shaped by super­posters like Mr. Wasser­man. Their exag­ger­at­ed world­views play well on the algo­rithm, allow­ing them to col­lec­tive­ly — and often unknow­ing­ly — dom­i­nate news­feeds. “That’s some­thing spe­cial about Face­book,” Dr. Paluck said. “If you end up get­ting a lot of time on the feed, you are influ­en­tial. It’s a dif­fer­ence with real life.”

A great many general-interest Face­book groups that I see are dom­i­nat­ed by troll­ish peo­ple whose vis­i­bil­i­ty relies on how provoca­tive they can get with­out being banned. This is true in many Quaker-focused groups. Face­book pri­or­i­tizes engage­ment and noth­ing seems to get our fin­gers mad­ly tap­ping more than provo­ca­tion by some­one half-informed.

For­mal mem­ber­ship in a Quak­er meet­ing is a con­sid­ered process; for many Quak­er groups, pub­lic min­istry is also a delib­er­at­ed process, with clear­ness com­mit­tees, anchor com­mit­tees, etc. On Face­book, mem­ber­ship con­sists of click­ing a like but­ton; pub­lic min­istry, aka vis­i­bil­i­ty, is a mat­ter of hav­ing a lot of time to post com­ments. Pub­lic groups with min­i­mal mod­er­a­tion which run on Face­book’s engagement-inducing algo­rithms are the pub­lic face of Friends these days, far more vis­i­ble than any pub­li­ca­tion or rec­og­nized Quak­er body’s Face­book pres­ence. I writ­ten before of my long-term wor­ry that with the rise of social media gate­keep­ing sites, we’re not the ones writ­ing our sto­ry anymore.

I don’t have any answers. But the NYTimes piece helped give me some use­ful ways of think­ing about these phenomena.

Quaker Money

July 27, 2018

Here’s a from-the-archives piece I stum­bled again on recent­ly. It’s from New Eng­land his­to­ri­an Bet­sy Caz­den, whose insights on Quak­er cul­ture I adore. She wrote this for Friends Jour­nal in 2006:

How did Friends come to do so well? The stan­dard sto­ry is a vari­ant on the Puri­tan one: Quak­ers became wealthy by work­ing dili­gent­ly; extend­ing their exper­i­men­tal approach to reli­gion to invent new indus­tri­al tech­nolo­gies; trad­ing hon­est­ly (there­by attract­ing cus­tomers); mak­ing pro­duc­tive use of transat­lantic kin­ship net­works; and liv­ing fru­gal­ly, with­out money-drains like drink­ing or gam­bling, there­by free­ing up mon­ey for sav­ings, invest­ment, and phil­an­thropic giv­ing to Quaker-run insti­tu­tions. All of that may be true, but is at best par­tial. The unspo­ken “rest of the sto­ry” has two pieces: land and slaves.

I’m sure I’ve read this arti­cle before (I uncon­scious­ly sum­ma­rized it this past May) but I think it’s an impor­tant dis­cus­sion to rethink every so often.

Autopsy of a Deceased Church

July 26, 2018

From a book review by Macken­zie Mor­gan on the Quak­er Out­reach site:

Often church­es that fail to reflect their chang­ing local com­mu­ni­ty die off in a gen­er­a­tion or two. Implic­it bias has been a point of dis­cus­sion in some year­ly meet­ings in recent years, and this is related.

In fact, a Friend once told me they’d been asked, “can we tar­get these Face­book ads only to peo­ple who are just like us?”

Actu­al­ly, Face­book can cre­ate what they call looka­like audi­ences. It’s very cool and very creepy at the same time. It’s part of the suite of fine-grain tar­get­ing tools that’s let­ting polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­dists and lifestyle-focused com­pa­nies con­trol our media con­sump­tion at the social feed lev­el and rein­force liked-minded group­think. Atten­tion silos are dan­ger­ous for our democ­ra­cy and they’re no good for our church­es. If the Quak­er good news has any mean­ing left in it, it has to be wide­ly applic­a­ble out­side of our cul­tur­al, style bubbles.

Autop­sy of a Deceased Church

Peterson Toscano is a reluctant minister

July 12, 2018

This week’s fea­tured arti­cle over at Friends Jour­nal is Peter­son Toscano’s “A Reluc­tant Min­is­ter.”

Satire and irony, espe­cial­ly when it is sub­tle, done in char­ac­ter, or relies on tone can be mis­un­der­stood when tak­en lit­er­al­ly. Friends can get so caught up in the words that we miss the point. It is nev­er fun explain­ing a joke to a Friend, but even that inter­ac­tion is part of the work of pre­sent­ing per­for­mance art for Quak­ers. We are com­mit­ted to fair­ness and love. Com­e­dy can be used to hurt oth­ers or to make light of seri­ous issues. Unpack­ing a joke can lead to rich dis­cus­sion. I seek to use com­e­dy to shed light on impor­tant issues. Still, some Friends pre­fer the straight­for­ward mes­sage over the com­ic performance. 

I real­ly appre­ci­ate the care and hon­esty that Peter­son has put into defin­ing his work. It would be so easy for him to label his per­for­mance art as min­istry and wear it as a cloak of respectabil­i­ty. Much of his work does indeed act as min­istry and he uses a clear­ness com­mit­tee as a Quak­er dis­cern­ment tool. But he wants to keep a space open for what you might call artis­tic con­fu­sion and so describes him­self as a “the­atri­cal per­for­mance activist.”

When the pen­du­lum began trend toward re-embracing the ideas of min­istry with­in Lib­er­al Quak­erism some years back, many forms of pub­lic work start­ed being labeled min­istry. It might be a sign of the incom­plete­ness of our follow-through that few of the peo­ple com­ing for­ward with min­istries felt com­fort­able call­ing them­selves min­is­ters. I like the idea of keep­ing middle-ground spaces that we don’t try to arti­fi­cial­ly kludge into clas­sic Quak­er models. 

A Quaker Response to this Moral Crisis

July 3, 2018

A Quak­er Response to this Moral Crisis

Friends are seek­ing ways to respond to the cur­rent refugee cri­sis. One exam­ple is a minute of con­cern recent­ly approved by San­ta Mon­i­ca Meet­ing. Oth­er Friends are tak­ing action by vis­it­ing detainees in the Ade­lan­to Deten­tion Cen­ter. Some are accom­pa­ny­ing refugees in the courts. Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions like FCNL and AFSC are call­ing for com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform and an end to ICE. I am includ­ing this let­ter in hopes of stim­u­lat­ing more dis­cus­sion among Friends (and oth­ers) about what we can do to respond to this lat­est moral crisis. 

https://​laquak​er​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​1​8​/​0​7​/​r​e​u​n​i​t​e​-​r​e​f​u​g​e​e​-​f​a​m​i​l​i​e​s​-​s​e​p​a​r​a​t​e​d​-​a​t​.​h​tml

Reddit AMA on American Revolutionary-era persecutions

June 18, 2018

Over on Red­dit, his­to­ri­an Jason Agli­et­ti hosts an Ask-Me-Anything about eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry Quak­er his­to­ry in Mary­land. There’s some good dis­cus­sion about the ways the largely-neutral Quak­er pop­u­la­tion was treat­ed in var­i­ous colonies, espe­cial­ly Mary­land, which is Agli­et­ti’s focus.

“The Friends They Loathed” was defend­ed in April 2018 and exam­ined a chap­ter of Mary­land his­to­ry that had nev­er been explored in detail before — the reli­gious per­se­cu­tion against Quak­ers dur­ing the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. Despite being a his­to­ri­an of Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty, I hold no reli­gious beliefs.

I am a recent­ly grad­u­at­ed with an MA in His­tor­i­cal Stud­ies which focused on the study of 18th Quak­er his­to­ry in Mary­land. AMA! from Quak­ers

Regarding Pronouns

April 20, 2018

On Quak­erQuak­er, Kir­by Urn­er starts a dis­cus­sion on pro­nouns which is not the dis­cus­sion you might expect:

I pay a lot of atten­tion to pro­noun use. Peo­ple often say “our nuclear weapons” and/or “what we did in Viet­nam”. I don’t have any nuclear weapons, nor do my friends.

Kir­by’s lost reminds of the clas­sic “What do you mean we, white man” Lone Ranger / Ton­to joke.

Part of the deal of the mod­ern nation state and its trap­pings of democ­ra­cy is that we all own it togeth­er. The peas­antry could be lack­sidaisi­cal when they were jiat doing the bid­ding of whichev­er duke/warlord/king con­trolled the plot of land in which their ances­tral vil­lage now sat. But now we fight nation­al wars because the state is us. It’s most­ly a load of huey but it dis­arms what should be the nat­ur­al Chris­t­ian (and plain human) dis­taste for jin­go­is­tic tribalism.

http://www.quakerquaker.org/m/discussion?id=2360685%3ATopic%3A159446