Doug Gwyn - Quaker Ranter

Doug Gwyn on QuakerSpeak: What Does Quakerism Teach About Connecting to Nature?

Martin Kelley — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 02:29:14 +0000

A new video from Quaker historian Gwyn:

Connecting with nature is about more than just exercise or tranquility. As Quaker author Doug Gwyn shares, even in the 17th century, Quakers were concerned about our disconnection with the natural world and what it would mean for the future.

http://quakerspeak.com/what-does-quakerism-teach-about-connecting-to-nature/

Photons Don’t Phail

Martin Kelley — Thu, 10 May 2018 23:51:43 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote about a New England Friends meeting that was working to share the electricity generated by its solar panels with its neighbors. In response, one of our longtime blogging Friends Doug Bennett, now of Maine’s Durham Meeting and formerly president of some college somewhere, wrote me about lyrics that its former pastor Doug Gwyn (this guy) wrote. I love both of these Dougs so of course I’ll share the link with you all, including this first stanza of “Photons Don’t Fail Us Now”:

it would be foolish to vote on the nature of a photon
as Quakers we simply approve
you can argue to the grave it’s a particle or wave
we just want to let it hit our roof

“Photons Don’t Fail Us Now,” Song Lyrics by Doug Gwyn

Quakers & Anabaptists

Martin Kelley — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 19:56:29 +0000

Tough question in the bookstore today: a customer called asking for books about the connection between Friends and Anabaptists. Remarkably, we couldn’t come up with much of a list. But let’s be interactive here, readers! What books did I forget about? And what’s this phenomena of denying Quaker/Anabaptist common roots and cross-pollination?

Peter Brock talks about it in “The Quaker Peace Testimony 1660 to 1914”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/1–85072-065–7 and Doug Gwyn has some stuff in “Seekers Found”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/0–87574-960–7 but there _should_ be more than that. We tried going from the other end and surfed over to “Anabaptist Books”:http://www.anabaptistbooks.com/ and typed in “Quaker” but not much there.
After telling our customer that we couldn’t come up with too much on Quaker/Anabaptist cross-pollinization, he said that’s what he had been discovering. He asked me why I thought that was. Good question. I told him that Quakers had spent much of the twenthieth century distancing themselves from Anabaptists, and on giving up on our shared ‘peculiar’ testimonies on plainness and separation from the world. This really coincides with the rise of the Quakers-as-Protestant theme and with the renaming of the testimonies in modern secular language.