This raises a concern for me about how the Quaker movement might oversee this kind of public presentation of our faith and practice going forward. In the spirit of Wikipedia’s platform as a peer-to-peer project, and in keeping with the non-hierarchical governance structures so important to Friends, and, of course, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I propose a peer-to-peer process for the oversight of such presentations, a long-range project of review that would hopefully include Friends with real expertise in the many areas of Quaker history, faith, and practice covered in this entry and whatever other entries we find

This relates to a long-term concern of mine that so much of the most public information on Friends isn’t created by us. Wikipedia’s relatively benign (there’s actually a bit of a Quaker process connection) but our participation on social media like Facebook and Twitter are mediated by algorithms favoring controversy. I edit Wikipedia entries a couple of times a year but am also a small part of Friends Journal efforts to built out Quaker.org to make it a useful, accurate, and publicly visible introduction to the Religious Society of Friends.

There’s some good discussion on Mastodon by some Wikipedia editors who explain that Davison’s plan would be seen with some suspicion by Wikipedia. As commenter Dan York wrote:

Wikipedia has a very strong ethos around “conflict of interest” with the sense that people too close to a topic can’t write in a neutral point-of-view. There’s definitely value in folks working to improve the pages, but they need to keep these views in mind—and back up everything they do with reliable sources.

Quakers on Wikipedia

While working on an essay on Quaker metaphysics—what’s going on in our personal mystical experiences, and especially, in…

Through the Flaming Sword

The “awfulness” of becoming a minister lay partly in the high expectations which the Friends placed on their ministers, for they expected everything and nothing all at the same time. Ministers were to do everything which the Light, the Master, the Guide, the Heavenly Father (to use some of the various names) required of them; they were supposed to follow every intimation and speak every word given them in the light. Thus mothers or fathers might have to leave family, work, and friends for years while they traveled, not knowing when the Spirit would allow them to return. On the other hand nothing was expected of them if they felt no immediate leading, not, of course, could they ever prepare for any sermon. Thus each new meeting, each new family visit was a fresh test of faith in which one might be called to rise without knowing what was to be said, or what difficult or perplexing words might come forth; even worse, a well-known minister might be required to remain silent throughout a meeting called just for him…

Thus, as their journals make very clear, they experienced the body of Christ not as a metaphor but as a living climate or organism from which — as well as in which — they functioned. They saw themselves not as separate leaders but as extensions of the one Life and Power. They dwelt together with the other members in the same pool of the divine presence which blended all souls together in a wonderful unity. Although Quaker ministers were expected to be very good examples of the Quaker way of life, they were not required to be leaders all the time; they could sink back into the nurture and unity of the body until such times as they were clearly called to stand forth for the Lord. They knew that if they were “faithful,” he would give them both words and power, or the “matter and the “life.” Yet even so, each new meeting was a renewed test of faith; as Hannah Stratton (1825–1903) of Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative) put it near the end of her life, “it don’t get easy.”

Ever since I found Friends at age 20, I’ve been drawn to this rather serious vision of ministry, with its strict demand for a complete trust in the Holy Spirit’s prompting in the moment. It’s not easy to square with modern Quaker practices. I’m due to lead 5.5 hours of a workshop next week; the topic and times are set. But maybe this dilemma is not so very new. Traveling ministers in the quietist “middle period” that Tabor describes had itineraries and meetings called for them (as for the minister of his story that was led to stay silent for a called worship).

How do you prepare when you shouldn’t prepare? Perhaps by spending part of a Saturday afternoon reading an old Bill Tabor pamphlet that’s not on a topic you’re expected to lead on the following week.

I’m reading Tabor’s essay in Quaker Religious Thought number 50, autumn 1980.

I believe that people will respond to love, because I believe people respond to God. And if God is love, that is what people will respond to, is love. I think that’s the key to a lot of things and to a lot of problems in the world, because if we truly believe in God and we truly believe that God is love as we were taught, and we act on that–and I believe that we are God’s hands here–then everything we do needs to be rooted in love.

http://quakerspeak.com/being-gods-hands/

As we keep sowing, we divide the labor according to our gifts. For every radical prophet who risks everything to speak the truth, we hope some conservative is doing a good job of guarding the money that will pay the prophet’s bail. We make space for the pastor who cherishes our community, and we make space for the outward-facing evangelist, who understands when the moment is ripe to intervene in our culture.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/06/sowing-in-tears.html

As we keep sowing, we divide the labor according to our gifts. For every radical prophet who risks everything to speak the truth, we hope some conservative is doing a good job of guarding the money that will pay the prophet’s bail. We make space for the pastor who cherishes our community, and we make space for the outward-facing evangelist, who understands when the moment is ripe to intervene in our culture.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/06/sowing-in-tears.html

As we keep sowing, we divide the labor according to our gifts. For every radical prophet who risks everything to speak the truth, we hope some conservative is doing a good job of guarding the money that will pay the prophet’s bail. We make space for the pastor who cherishes our community, and we make space for the outward-facing evangelist, who understands when the moment is ripe to intervene in our culture.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/06/sowing-in-tears.html

Bartender

Okay, maybe it’s a bit OCD but I hate cluttered Mac menubars running along the top of my screen. This app was just rebuilt for High Sierra and is an essential tool. I have most everything hidden and have set up a keyboard shortcut (the little-used right “option” key) to toggle the full menubar icon set.

Fantastical

This is my favorite calendar app. It sits in the menubar, ready to give a beautiful agenda view with just a single tap. It can open up to a full view. Manage calendars is easy and the natural language processing is suburb.

Cardhop

Just released, this is Fantastical’s newest cousin, an app for managing contacts from Flexibits. It works with whatever you have set up for contacts on your Mac (I use Google but iCloud is fine too). Given Flexibit’s track record, and Cardhop’s resemblance to the discontinued Cobook, this is likely to be a winner for me.

Favioconographer

I’ve been a Chrome user since the week it debuted but lately I’ve been trying to switch to Safari, wanting its superior battery management and syncing of bookmarks and tabs with iOS. Many of Safari’s annoyances have lessoned as Apple itinerated with each release. There are enough extensions now that I can get by. I am, though, one of those weird people whom John Gruber identified: wannabee Safari users who really like Favicons in tabs. Fortunately, Faviconographer has come along. There are occasional oddities (floating icons, icons that don’t match site) but overall it improves the Safari experience enough to make it a win over Chrome.

1Blocker for Mac

Uses the built-in content filtering system built into Mac Safari. Good syncing with the iOS app. “Content filtering” (aka blocking) has become an important security concern and let’s face it: the web runs so much better without all the crap that some sites throw in along with their content. You can whitelist sites that respect readers. Honorable mention in Chrome or as an alternative for Safari is uBlock Origin, a great blocker (and distinct from standard uBlock, which I don’t recommend).

Karabiner-Elements

Lets you remap the generally useless Caps Lock key. I have it mapped Brett-Terpstra style so that a single click opens Spotlight search and a hold and click acts as a hyper key (imagine a shift key that you can use for any keystroke).

BetterTouchTool

Remap keys and key combinations. With Karabiner, I can use it to have Capslock‑C open a particular app, for instance.

Tunnelbear

I used to think VPNs were a luxury but with people hacking in on public Wi-Fi accounts and the loss of privacy, I’ve signed up for this easy-to-use VPN service. One account can power multiple devices so my laptop and phone are secured.

Evernote

It’s been around for years. I currently have 13,000 notes stored in Evernote, including every issue of the magazine I work for going back to the mid-1950s. There was a time a few years ago when I was worried for Evernote, as it kept chasing quirky side projects as its main app got buggier and buggier. But they’ve had a shake-up, ditched the distractions and have built the service back up. Most of my projects are organized with Evernote.

Ulysses

There are a gazillion writing apps out there that combine Markdown writing syntax with minimalist interfaces (Bear, IaWriter, Byword) but Ulysses has edged its way to being my favorite, with quick syncing and ability to post directly to WordPress.

Todoist

There are also a gazillion task managers. Todoist does a good job of keeping projects that need due dates in order.

1Password

You should be using a password manager. Repeat: you should be using a password manager. 1Password is rock solid. They’ve recently changed their economic model and strongly favor subscription accounts. While I’ve tried to limit just how many auto-pulling subscriptions I have, I understand the rationale and have switched.

Airmail

A great email app for Mac and iOS that can display and sort your Gmail accounts (and others too). Almost too many options if you’re the kind to fiddle with that sort of thing but easy to get started and great with just the defaults.

Google and Apple and clouds

The Big‑G should get a shoutout: it powers the databases for my email, calendar, contacts, and photos. All my hardware has migrated over to Apple, helped in large part by the opening up of its ecosystem to third-party apps.

What’s also useful to note is that all of the data-storing services are cloud based. If my phone or laptop disappeared, I could borrow a new one and be up to speed almost immediately. Since many of these apps run on databases run by Google, I can also switch apps or even have multiple apps accessing the same information for different purposes. There’s a real freedom to the app ecosystem these days.

First it was Dropbox, whose Carousel app promised to change everything. For $10/month, I can have all of the digitized photos I’ve ever taken all together. It changed how I access past events. Back in the day I might have taken 20 pictures and posted 2 to Flickr. The other 18 were for all intents inaccessible to me—on the backup drive that sits in a dusty drawer in my desk. Now I could look up some event on my public Flickr, remember the date, then head to Dropbox/Carousel to look through everything I took that day—all on my phone. Sometimes I’d even share the whole roll from that event to folks who were there.

But this was a two-step process. Flickr itself had boosted its storage space last year but it wasn’t until recently that they revealed a new Camera Roll and uploader that made this all work more seamlessly. So all my photos again went up there. Now I didn’t have to juggle between two apps.

Last week, Google finally (finally!) broke its photos from Google+ and the remnants of Picasa to give them their own home. It’s even more fabulous than Flickr and Dropbox, in that its search is so good as to feel like magic. People, places, and image subjects all can be accessed with the search speed that Google is known for. And this service is free and uploads old videos.

I’m constantly surprised how just how emotionally powerful an old photo or video can be (I waxed lyrically about this in Nostalgia Comes Early, written just before our last family vacation). This weekend I found a short clip from 2003 of my wife carrying our newborn in a backpack and citing how many times he had woken us up the night before. At the end she joked that she could guilt trip him in years to come by showing this video to him. Now the clip is something I can find, load, and play in a few seconds right from my ever-present phone.

So what I’ve noticed is this quick access to unshared photos is changing the nature of my cellphone photo-taking. I’m taking pictures that I never intend to share but that give me an establishing shot for a particular event: signs, driveway entrances, maps. Now that I have unlimited storage and a camera always within reach, I can use it as a quick log of even the most quotidian life events (MG Siegler recently wrote about The Power of the Screenshot, which is another way that quick and ubiquitous photo access is changing how and what we save.) With GPS coordinates and precise times, it’s especially useful. But the most profound effect is not the activity logging, but still the emotions release unlocking all-but-lost memories: remembering long-ago day trips and visits with old friends.