But a big gateway is genealogy. Over the years I’ve gotten countless emails and phone calls from excited newcomers who start off the conversation with details of their family tree (when I used to answer the Quakerbooks phone, I would let these folks go for about two minutes before gently interjecting “wow that’s fascinating!, do you wanna buy a book?!?”)

One fascinating factoid in this week’s QuakerSpeak video comes from Thomas Hamm:

If your family arrived in the United States before 1860, there’s probably a 50–50 chance that you have a Quaker ancestor somewhere.

Quaker Meetings shouldn’t try to be the gathering spots for prodigal family reunions. The early Quakers were strangers to one another, joining together because of the fire of their convictions. Ours is a living, breathing, ever evolving spiritual practice. Still: we are also a grouping of people. We look for belonging.

The longer I’m with Friends, the more I think ours is a religious community that draws strength from the tension of paradoxes. I have a soft spot for the old Quaker families. If Jesus brings some of the new people in through Beliefnet quizzes or Ancestry.com search results, well, maybe that’s okay.

http://quakerspeak.com/how-to-research-your-quaker-ancestry/

Develop personal rules: These are specific to you. A few of mine…. Never respond to an angry message from my phone. Always open a computer, sit down intentionally, and if possible wait 24 hours. ON social media – this might be a shorter time frame, but still, not until I can sit and center and not speak out of anger.

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I’m not sure if I’ve ever written down my personal guidelines. Some of these are generic to being a good online citizen (don’t feed trolls, don’t punch down, don’t respond in anger, disengage when a conversation is obviously running in circles).

Other guidelines of mine arguably come from Quaker values. For example, in general I won’t mention someone else on a forum in which they don’t appear. I’m especially wary on private Facebook groups, as they can easily become forum for detraction and us/them peer pressure.  The Tract Association pamphlet on detraction is really a must-read. It’s actually probably something worth re-reading every six months. Readers: what kind of practices have you developed to be a responsible Quaker online?

Over time, these challenges to the BME community became increasingly problematic. Members deleted accounts or stopped posting. By 2015, the main community forum – which used to have hundreds of posts a day – went without a single comment for over six months.

Having predicted many of the web’s functions and features, BME failed to anticipate its own demise.

It’s definitely something I’ve seen in my niche world of Quakers. I started QuakerQuaker as an independent site in part because I didn’t want Google and Facebook and Beliefnet to determine who we are. There’s the obvious problems—Beliefnet hiring a programmer to make a “What Religion Are You?” test based on a few books picked up the library one afternoon.

But there’s also more subtle problems. On Facebook anyone can start or join a group and start talking authoritatively about Quakers without actually being an active community member. I can think of a number of online characters who had never even visiting a Friends meeting or church.

Our tradition built up ways of defining our spokespeople though the practices of recorded ministers and elders, and of clarifying shared beliefs though documents like Faith and Practice. I’ll be the first to argue that this process has produced mixed results. But if it is to be adapted or reformed, I’d like the work to be done by us in a thoughtful, inclusive manner. Instead, the form of our discussions are now invisibly imposed by an outside algorithm that is optimized for obsessive engagement and advertising delivery. Facebook process is not Quaker process, yet it is largely what we use when we talk about Quakers outside of Sunday morning.

I think Facebook has helped alternative communities form. I’m grateful for the pop-up communities of interest I’m part of. And there are sites with more user generated content like Wikipedia and Reddit that hold an interesting middle-ground and where information is generally more accurate. But there’s still a critical role for self-organized independent publications, a niche that I think is continuing to be overshadowed in our current attention ecosystem.

How Facebook – the Walmart of the internet – dismantled online subcultures

Even though Facebook claims to be a global community, its rise has come at the expense of online…

The Conversation

Embedded Link

2012 Presidential Candidates Religious Backgrounds | Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Interested in how religion could affect the 2012 election? Learn about the 2012 presidential candidate’s religious backgrounds in Pew Forum online biographies.

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An educator F/friend of mine has gushed on about Moodle, the open
source education system and I have to admit it’s always looked intriguing. I’ve taught a
number of real-world Quakerism classes
and I’ve wondered whether online courses could help connect Friends and
seekers isolated by distance or theology. I’ve been wanting to try out
one of Beacon Hill’s online classes for awhile.

From the description:

Is online teaching new to you?

Don’t know where to start?

We’ll
begin with the simplest interactive course:
a “welcome to the class” section with a reading and one forum. We’ll
talk about technology: how settings change
the forum interface; but we’ll also discuss teaching technique: how
to present introductory material to students
who may have a wide range of experience and expectations.

Over the 10
weeks, we’ll cover: introducing the moodle environment; chats; forums;
choices and surveys; lessons; assignments; databases; wikis; quizzes.

You will have your own lesson space to explore all these tools and will
be expected to look at each other’s work and react to it. By March we
should all be ready to design and offer creative Moodle courses of our
own.

Classes only cost $25. You can find out more about the Beacon Hill’s Moodle online class and all their Quaker Studies classes. If anyone would be interested in some sort of QuakerQuaker-sponsored classes, let me know. We’ve got a lot of well-qualified Quaker teachers in the network and a lot of isolated Friends wanting to learn more.

“Every religious group has a major challenge on its hands from all directions,” says [Pew Forum director Luis] Lugo. When he factors in Pew’s February findings that 44% of adults say they’ve switched to another religion or none at all, Lugo says, “You have to wonder: How do you guarantee the integrity of a religious tradition when so many people are coming or going or following ideas that don’t match up?”

Lugo’s questions is particularly relevant for Friends, as many of us are converts. But the general turn toward a more experiential religiosity points to possibilities for further outreach. Don’t have the time to check the survey itself but USAToday looks to have some good graphs about it.

The Arch Street Meetinghouse grounds are also a cemetery. In about ten years time we can raze the meetinghouse for more headstones and in about twenty years time we can have a big party where we cash out the yearly meeting funds and just burn them in a big bonfire (there’s a fire station across the street), formally laying down Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The fifteen of us who are left can go attach ourselves to some other yearly meeting.

This year’s annual sessions continue their tradition of self-parody: the featured speakers are the umpteenth gray-hair professional Quaker talking about the peace testimony and a psychologist who appears on NPR. It’s safe to assume neither will stray beyond the mildest communities of faith talk to mention God, gospel order or naming of gifts, and that neither will ask why there’s almost no one under forty involved in the yearly meeting. The last time I went to a nominating committee workshop at annual sessions, members openly explained to me why Friends under forty couldn’t serve on committees. Later during that session we learned the average new attender was in their thirties yet the yearly meeting clerk didn’t think it was appropriate than any Friend under fifty comment on that (about 40 older Friends were recognized to share their thoughts, natch).

The generational freefall is coming to the yearly meeting. Arch Street Meeting is smack in the middle of one of the premier hip young neighborhoods of Philadelphia yet they’ve been resistant to doing any serious outreach or adult religious ed (I could tell stories: don’t get me started). This weekend I learned that the other downtown meeting, Central Philadelphia, continues its practice–almost policy–of not supporting emerging ministry in long-time young attenders (I could really tell stories). I wouldn’t be surprised if Philadelphia has the lowest per-capita yearly meeting attendance.

So why not just admit that the yearly meeting is irrelevant to younger Friends? Why not turn our meetinghouses into retirement homes?

PS: How I wish I weren’t so cynical about the yearly meeting. I don’t want to feel like it’s a state of all-out generational warfare. I’ve tried, really I have. I’m even willing to try again. But no where have I found a space to have these discussions, at yearly meeting or anywhere else. Other Phila. YM Friends concerned with these issues are welcome to email me–maybe we can figure out some forum for this either inside or outside of the official structures.
PPS: There are a lot of wonderful Friends involved with the yearly meeting. They have good ideas and sincerely try to make it a more welcoming place. The best part of the yearly meeting sessions I’ve attended have been the unexpected conversations. It’s the institution I am frustrated with: the sense that it’s bigger and dumber than all of us.
PPPS: What if I took my own words to heart and considered a PhYM renewal as part of the fifty-year plan? If I just stopped complaining and just attended patiently and faithfully year after year for those “teachable moments” that might inch it forward?

The day before Martin Luther King was murdered he said, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.” We must have this same desire if we are going to survive the fear and violence and mass confusion of our time. And we should be as unabashed about letting people know that it is our religious faith that motivates us, regardless of the setting or the consequences.

Many peace activists are driven by religious motivations, which is often all that keeps them going through all the hard times and non-appreciation. Yet we often present ourselves to the world in a secular way using rational arguments.

It took me a few years to really admit to myself that Nonviolence.org is a ministry intimately connected with my Quaker faith. In the eight years it’s been going, thousands of websites have sprung up with good intentions and hype only to disappear into oblivion (or the internet equivalent, the line reading “Last updated July 7, 1997”). I have a separate forum for “Quaker religious and peace issues” [which later became the general QuakerRanter blog] In my essay on the Quaker peace testimony, I worry that modern religious pacifists have spent so much effort convincing the world that pacifism makes sense from a strictly rationalist viewpoint that we’ve largely forgotten our own motivations. Don’t get me wrong: I think pacifism also makes sense as a pragmatic policy; while military solutions might be quicker, pacifism can bring about the long-term changes that break the cycle of militarism. But how can we learn to balance the sharing of both our pragmatic and religious motivations?