feelings

Young adults profiled in publications

Martin Kelley — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 01:31:44 +0000

Two recent articles in publications have gotten some buzz. One written by AP reporter Luis Andres Henao looks at a rise of young adult interest in Friends and profiles a dramatic increase in attendance at Arch Street Meeting in Philadelphia. It’s been reprinted in a lot of newspapers. It quotes a Valerie Goodman:

“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.

Mid-November Links

Martin Kelley — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 16:33:22 +0000

The November Quakers Today podcast dropped this week, asking How do you process memories, experiences and feelings? It includes interviews with Rashid Darden and Vicki Winslow and looks at the Quaker influences of Virginia Woolf.

This webpage will dutchify any location’s Google Street View, slimming lanes and adding greenery and bike paths. Yes, this everywhere please. Via Kottke.

The Art of Persuasion

Martin Kelley — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 21:06:37 +0000

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting highlights artists, including Signe Wilkinson and Ramona Sharples, in The Art of Persuasion:

“I was thinking about (emotion and art) recently as I was going through all my comics, and there is a rhythm that is very slow and quiet. It’s not very actiony comics that I’m drawing … because … a lot of the feelings that I am describing are melancholy, and that plays a role in the way that my comics are presented.”

We Quakers should be cooler than the Sweat Lodge

Martin Kelley — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 15:53:11 +0000

I have just come back from a “Meeting for Listening for Sweat Lodge Concerns,” described as “an opportunity for persons to express their feelings in a worshipful manner about the cancellation of the FGC Gathering sweat lodge workshop this year.” Non-Quakers reading this blog might be surprised to hear that Friends General Conference holds sweat lodges, but it has and they’ve been increasingly controversial. This year’s workshop was cancelled after FGC received a very strongly worded complaint from the Wampanoag Native American tribe. Today’s meeting intended to listen to the feelings and concerns of all FGC Friends involved and was clerked by the very-able Arthur Larrabee. There was powerful ministry, some predictable “ministry” and one stunning message from a white Friend who dismissed the very existance of racism in the world (it’s just a illusion, the people responsible for it are those who perceive it).

I’ve had my own run-in’s with the sweat lodge, most unforgettably when I was the co-planning clerk of the 2002 Adult Young Friends program at FGC (a few of us thought it was inappropriate to transfer a portion of the rather small AYF budget to the sweat lodge workshop, a request made with the argument that so many high-school and twenty-something Friends were attending it). But I find myself increasingly unconcerned about the lodge. It’s clear to me now that it part of another tradition than I am. It is not the kind of Quaker I am. The question remaining is whether an organization that will sponsor it is a different tradition.

How did Liberal Friends get to the place where most our our younger members consider the sweat lodge ceremony to be the high point of their Quaker experience? The sweat lodge has given a generation of younger Friends an opportunity to commune with the divine in a way that their meetings do not. It has given them mentorship and leadership experiences which they do not receive from the older Friends establishment. It has given them a sense of identity and purpose which they don’t get from their meeting “community.”

I don’t care about banning the workshop. That doesn’t address the real problems. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and wonder why they’d want to spend a week with some white Quaker guy who wonders aloud in public whether he’s “a Quaker or an Indian” (could we have a third choice?). I’ve always thought this was just rather embarrassing. I want the sweat lodge to wither away in recognition of it’s inherent ridiculousness. I want younger Friends to get a taste of the divine love and charity that Friends have found for 350 years. We’re simply cooler than the sweat lodge.

* * * *
And what really is the sweat lodge all about? I don’t really buy the cultural appropriation critique (the official party line for canceling it argues that it’s racist). Read founder George Price’s Friends Journal article on the sweat lodge and you’ll see that he’s part of a long-standing tradition. For two hundred years, Native Americans have been used as mythic cover for thinly disguised European-American philosophies. The Boston protesters who staged the famous tea party all dressed up as Indians, playing out an emerging mythology of the American rebels as spiritual heirs to Indians (long driven out of the Boston area by that time). In 1826, James Fenimore Cooper turned that myth into one of the first pieces of classic American literature with a story about the “Last” of the Mohicans. At the turn of the twentieth century, the new boy scout movement claimed that their fitness and socialization system was really a re-application of Native American training and initiation rites. Quakers got into the game too: the South Jersey and Bucks County summer camps they founded in the nineteen-teens were full of Native American motifs, with cabins and lakes named after different tribes and the children encouraged to play along.

Set in this context, George Price is clearly just the latest white guy to claim that only the spirit of purer Native Americans will save us from our Old World European stodginess. Yes, it’s appropriation I guess, but it’s so transparent and classically American that our favorite song “Yankee Doodle” is a British wartime send-up of the impulse. We’ve been sticking feathers in our caps since forever.

In the Friends Journal article, it’s clear the Quaker sweat lodge owes more to the European psychotherapy of Karl Jung than Chief Ockanickon. It’s all about “liminality” and initiation into mythic archetypes, featuring cribbed language from Victor Turner, the anthropologist who was very popular circa 1974. Price is clear but never explicit about his work: his sweat lodge is Jungian psychology overlaid onto the outward form of a Native American sweatlodge. In retrospect it’s no surprise that a birthright Philadelphia Friend in a tired yearly meeting would try to combine trendy European pop psychology with Quaker summer camp theming. What is a surprise (or should be a surprise) is that Friends would sponsor and publish articles about a “Quaker Sweat Lodges” without challenging the author to spell out the Quaker contribution to a programmed ritual conducted in a consecrated teepee steeplehouse.

(Push the influences a little more, and you’ll find that Victor Turner’s anthropological findings among obscure African tribes arguably owes as much to his Catholicism than it does the facts on the ground. More than one Quaker wit has compared the sweat lodge to Catholic mass; well: Turner’s your missing philosophical link.)

* * * *
Yesterday I had some good conversation about generational issues in Quakerism. I’m certainly not the only thirty-something that feels invisible in the bulldozer of baby boomer assumptions about our spirituality. I’m also not the only one getting to the point where we’re just going to be Quaker despite the Quaker institutions and culture. I think the question we’re all grappling with now is how we relate to the institutions that ignore us and dismiss our cries of alarm for what we Friends have become.

Confessions of an Anti-Sactions Activist

Martin Kelley — Wed, 30 Jul 2003 11:10:09 +0000

There are a bunch of fascinating rants against the contemporary peace movement as the result of an article by Charles M. Brown, an anti-sanctions activist that has somewhat-unfairly challenged his former colleagues at the Nonviolence.org-affiliated Voices in the Wilderness. Brown talks quite frankly about his feelings that Saddam Hussein used the peace group for propaganda purposes and he challenges many of the cultural norms of the peace movement. I don’t know if Brown realized just how much the anti-peace movement crowd would jump at his article. It’s gotten play in InstaPundit and In Context: None So Blind.
Brown’s critique is interesting but not really fair: he faults Voices for having a single focus (sanctions) and single goal (changing U.S. policy) but what else should be expected of a small group with no significant budget? Over the course of his work against sanctions Brown started studying Iraqi history as an academic and he began to worry that Voices disregarded historical analysis that “did not take … Desert Storm as their point of departure.” But was he surprised? Of course an academic is going to have a longer historical view than an underfunded peace group. The sharp focus of Voices made it a welcome anomaly in the peace movement and gave it a strength of a clear message. Yes it was a prophetic voice and yes it was a largely U.S.-centric voice but as I understand it, that was much of the point behind its work: We can do better in the world. It was Americans taking responsibility for our own people’s blindness and disregard for human life. That Iraq has problems doesn’t let us off the hook of looking at our own culture’s skeletons.
What I do find fascinating is his behind-the-scenes description of the culture of the 1990s peace movement. He talks about the roots of the anti-sanctions activism in Catholic-Worker “dramaturgy.” He’s undoubtedly right that peace activists didn’t challenge Baathist party propaganda enough, that we used the suffering of Iraqi people for our own anti-war propaganda, and that our analysis was often too simplistic. That doesn’t change the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died from sanctions that most Americans knew little about.
The peace movement doesn’t challenge its own assumptions enough and I’m glad Brown is sharing a self-critique. I wish he were a bit gentler and suspect he’ll look back at his work with Voices with more charity in years to come. Did he know the fodder his critique would give to the hawkish groups? Rather than recant his past as per the neo-conservative playbook, he could had offered his reflections and critique with an acknowlegment that there are plenty of good motivations behind the work of many peace activists. I like a lot of what Brown has to say but I wonder if peace activists will be able to hear it now. I think Brown will eventually find his new hawkish friends are at least as caught up in group-think, historical myopia, and propaganda propagation as the people he critiques.
Voices in the Wilderness has done a lot of good educating Americans about the effects of our policies overseas. It’s been hard and often-thankless work in a climate that didn’t support peace workers either morally or financially. The U.S. is a much better place because of Voices and the peace movement was certainly invigorated by its breath of fresh air.