Now we have “uni-context,” the idea that our online social lives bleed into all of our different networks (think: friends, work colleagues, romantic interests) so much that the networks have been flattened; the “context” has “collapsed” (there’s a whole Wikipedia post on this). The refinement of this idea into “uni-context” comes from Agnes Callard, a UChicago prof. Where once we could show different faces to different audiences, now everyone sees all.

First off, I’m not sure I really buy it from a cultural tech perspective. The original Facebook ideal of wide social graphs and public accounts feels like a dinosaur. I picked up this article from Jason Kottke, who notes that “blogs have global context.” Twenty years ago, yes, many of us were living very public online lives—or at least made an image of ourselves that was very accessible on blogs and in networks like the OG image-sharing network Flickr, which defaulted to public access.

I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Gen Z is mostly absent from public spaces like Facebook and usually keeps pretty locked-down accounts. The app that has come to define the 2020s is TikTok (and its clones), which is a highly performative space where most of us consume, not create. I had a great after-meeting talk with two younger Quakers this weekend about outreach. Most of their discussions happen on various Discords, networks so private you generally can’t even find out about particular “server” except through word of mouth. When I asked them how interested seekers were supposed to find local Friends if everything was locked down on private networks, one of them suggested there should be an email list. I’m glad I wasn’t drinking any coffee at that moment because I would have had a real-life spit take. My first Quaker organizing thirty years ago was putting together an email contact list first for YAFs in my area and then worldwide because I didn’t see anyone else doing it. Back then local YAF networks were invisible to outsiders because the web as we know it barely existed. One could argue that GenZ has reinvented the privacy but also invisibility of the 1990s.

But granting the “uni-context” conceit for argument, this is a big post of Quaker plainness. Yes there were mostly unwritten rules but if you open up an old copy of one of the *Books of Discipline* and turn to the plainness section, you’ll find that it focuses on intention. My favorite query asks if you dress in a way “calculated to please a vain and wanton mind.”

It is the Quaker concept of *intregrity* at play. Going back to root meanings, something that is integral cannot be broken into pieces without losing its identity. We should act and present ourselves in the same way in all context. Who we are should be who we are, whether at work, play, church, etc. Similarly our *yeas* should be *yeas* and our *nays* *nays* in all context so that we don’t need a special incantation of swearing to tell the absolute truth.

Of course our lives are complex. I’m a runner and I put on running gear when I go out, especially in the August heat. But I’m not doing that for a calculated reason but a practical one. And I often have a pre-run running shirt on when I log into a work Zoom call.

Anyway it’s sort of sad that so many Friends have consigned old Quaker practices to the dust heap. The ethics, if not the details, might be something philosophers are seeking today.

A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird

Once you learn what the “uni-context” is, you won’t stop seeing it everywhere

www.derekthompson.org

“It feels like I can have a minute to breathe. It’s different than having a moment of meditation in my apartment because there’s still all of the distractions around,” Goodman says. “And it’s crazy being in a room full of other people that are all there to experience that themselves.”

The other is a beautiful essay by a new UK Friend, who explains the appeal of the silence:

It was as if someone had turned down the volume of the world, and all that remained was my feelings, sitting raw and open like a wound. Rather than running, I sat for an hour and let them wash over me. I left with a fresher perspective and spent the rest of the day in a calm daze. For the first time in a while, I felt anchored to something greater than myself.

I talked with Peterson Toscano about his fiction piece in the November issue of Friends Journal and we segued into all sorts of byways into how fiction can show us parts of spiritual lives that straight-ahead essays can’t.

I don’t think Quakers’ historical memory always serves us very well. In 1656, George Fox wrote a letter from Launceston Gaol, a portion of which is quoted in every edition of Faith and Practice. It’s been reproduced as giant posters and the key phrase has become one of the go-to elevator pitches for modern Friends. It tells us to “be patterns” and “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them ye may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you: then to the Lord God you shall be a sweet savour, and a blessing.”

We’ve taken one paragraph from one letter as a mission statement and now we get people wringing their hands trying to reconcile this Pollyanna-style niceness with the horror we see in the world. You get Friends valiantly trying (and mostly failing) to see “that of God” in ICE agents, terrorists, or authoritarian political leaders.

I think a big part of the problem is that Quakers have overall been a comfortable, well-off people for a long time. We’ve spent much of the last 300 years mostly remembering the happy-feeling stuff. Fox and his fellow early Friends were wary of “the world,” seeing it as a fallen place that we could transcend only with the guidance and healing powers of the Living Christ. Yes, he talked about being patterns in that letter, but way down. The letter actually started off in a thunderous manner that quite frankly, I think perhaps speaks more clearly to our time:

Dwell in the power of life and wisdom, and dread of the Lord of life, and of heaven and earth, that you may be preserved in the wisdom of God over all, and be a terror and a dread to all the adversaries of God, answering that of God in them all, spreading the truth abroad, awakening the witness, confounding the deceit, gathering up out of transgression into the life, into the covenant of light and peace with God. Let all nations hear the sound by word or by writing. Spare no place, spare no tongue, nor pen; but be obedient to the Lord God. Go through the work, and be valiant for the truth upon earth; tread and trample down all that is contrary.

None of this is practical advice for what to do if you see secret police jump out of unmarked van to kidnap someone off the street. But what if our editions of Faith and Practice all advised us to a terror and dread and to walk the earth treading and trampling on all that is contrary to divine love? Toward the end of the letter, Fox advised us to “be obedient to the power, for that will save you out of the hands of unreasonable men and preserve you over the world to himself.” May it be so.

Other commentaries: Simon St. Laurent (2007), Stuart Masters (2016), Mark Wutka (2018) and Lewis Benson’s brilliant 1970 essay “ ‘That of God’: What Did George Fox Mean by It?” Also, John Andrew Gallery has a recent Pendle Hill pamphlet on the essay, which I haven’t read but assume is worth reading.

Update: in the Reddit discussion KeithB said that he wondered if there were Quakers out there looking for justification to tangle it up with ICE officers. Pretty much as we were talking, word came out that the son of well-known Philly-area Quaker family being arrested at his home in Portland, Oregon, on suspicions of participating in violent anti-ICE protests a few weeks ago.

The prosecutors have released a bunch of pictures of violent activity being perpetrated by someone who looks like the accused, with a similar arm tattoo. That protestor used a stop sign as a battering ram, and then threw a brick at an ICE agent that hit his head, drew blood, and required medical attention. I sure hope it’s not a Quaker in those photos and that his defense attorneys can prove it. Tread and trampling is not a license for assault.

The following post was written by Blake Everitt, a Friend the UK and member of the newly-formed Revolutionary Quakers. This essay explores the prophetic and apocalyptic nature of early Quakerism, and sketches out how middle class revisionism took over the Religious Society of Friends.

The Religious Society of Friends: Children of Prophets or Children of Propheticide?

Meanwhile, membership dropped precipitously, as meetings applied discipline increasingly rigorously for walking disorderly in all manner of ways. In 1859, a prize of one hundred pounds was offered by an anonymous British Friend for the essay that best explained this decline and that offered the most promising solutions

The process was anything but overnight. As I understand the history it would be another half century from the prize to a yearly-meeting-wide shift. I don’t think many Friends in England appreciate just how Evangelical their yearly meeting has become in these years; their refusal to recognize American Hicksites led to the latter’s shunning from the world Quaker family and meant modernist Quaker responses would evolve on largely separate paths.

I wonder if British Friend William Pollard will make an appearance in Steven’s posts. I’ve been fascinated how Philadelphia Hicksites took to him despite the formal institutional barriers. [Update: Steven just dropped part three and there’s Pollard!]

The Rise of Liberal Quakerism—Part 2

Do Friends today have faith and trust in ‘that of God’ in every person? Are we striving to answer ‘that of God’ in others, and do we have the faith that doing so may eventually bring them away from evil? I ask this because much of the discourse today seems to ignore this.

“That of God in everyone” is one of those phrases that many traditional-leaning Friends have found a bit problematic over the years. Quaker co-founder George Fox used it, but sparingly. It doesn’t even appear in his Journal. If you were looking for an “elevator pitch” of his beliefs, I would go with his spiritual opening that there is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to our condition. The most well-argued (perhaps over-argued) expose of “that of God” as a latter-day Quaker overlay came from Lewis Benson’s famous essay from 1970, ‘That of God in Every Man” — What Did George Fox Mean by It?

In the second half of the piece Mark asks whether our belief of that of God leads us to act differently in the political sphere. He struggles with this, as do I, and as do presumably all of us. I worry particularly about judging the way Friends act; whenever I see someone share a hard truth, I know I’ll quickly see someone else critique them for being too divisive, too “unQuakerly.”

Jesus famously overturned the money changers and Benjamin Lay spilled pig blood in yearly meeting sessions. Maybe the only guide we have is the active Guide. Maybe our orderly walking will look alternatively meek or divisive depending on the cues we’re given. And maybe we’ll be misunderstood even as we’re being the most faithful.

Mark finishes:

For now, I am striving to walk in the Light as best I can and manifest the fruit of the Spirit in my interactions with people

Belief, Faith, and “That of God”

One of the difficulties I have with the question “What do Quakers believe?” is that it makes an…

earofthesoul.blogspot.com

Update

Pam McAllister pointed out on her Global Nonviolence: Stories of Creative Action Facebook page that this story is online. Here’s a bit more of Juanita herself telling that bit:

Seven law enforcement officers had stalked in. I sat on the stool beneath the telephone, my back literally to the wall, the seven hemming me about in a semicircle. All of them appeared over six feet tall, and all of them were annoyed.

“Look,” said one, “you’re gonna go anyway. You might as well come peaceful.”

There they stood, ready and able to take me at any moment. But no move was made. The reason was obvious.

“Why don’t you put your clothes on, Mrs. Nelson?” This was a soft spoken plea from the more benign deputy. “You’re not hurting anybody but yourself.” His pained expression belied the assertion.

The essay where that came from is much longer and well worth reading.