In my latest author podcast interview, I talk with R.E. Martin and Jason A. Terry about the efforts to bring back worship focused specifically on the queer community to Friends Meeting of Washington (FMW). I especially appreciate the work of connecting with elders who participated in this worship in decades past — through the worst of the AIDS epidemic and through the struggle for growing acceptance of the 1990s.
This week I talked with my old Friend Anthony Manousos about the [waves hand in the air] political situation we’re in. I’ve known Anthony for over 28 years now, back when we were part of a conference to try to kick-start what later was reborn as Quaker Voluntary Service (spoiler: our attempt failed for what I think were mostly generational issues). Anthony is still protesting and witnessing to make a better world. I loved hearing his story of coalition work and the joy of organizing with music. His article, “We Have No King,” appears in this month’s Friends Journal.
I asked him what Quakers bring to protests:
One of the important things that we bring is our way of worship. And our way of worship helps to bring the temperature down. I think what the current regime wants is a violent movement opposing them. That plays out what they want (and certainly the assassination of Charlie Kirk plays into that scenario). What Quakers bring is a commitment to peaceful protest. And when we’re around, we can be that strong, committed, peaceful presence. And that’s important.
I also asked him a follow-up question of what we need to do to get out of the way and accept the leadership of others in social change. You can listen to his answers or read them in the show notes.
I talked with Friends Journal author Ronald Marullo this week. His article, “I Aint’ Marching Anymore” (a nod to Phil Ochs of course), recounts his path to conscientious objection during the Vietnam war, helped by a very knowledgable Quaker counselor. It always amazes me that just a few conversations at the right time can help someone clarify their beliefs and set their lives on a different path.
I was especially interested in talking about the after-effects of the CO process since I went through something similar myself. Around age 17 my father started lobbying hard for me to go to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Except for a few years in Presbyterian Sunday School we had grown up mostly a‑religious and I found the idea intriguing. I think in retrospect I was mostly excited by the idea of an orderly life that might address my ADHD (called hyperactivity in those days). I got far enough into the process to take a physical and get a letter of commendation from our congressperson but then thought more about the military itself. I realized I didn’t feel comfortable joining an organization whose purpose was threatening to kill. I had on principle, and without much deliberation, decided not to engage in schoolyard fights years before, and suffered the regular humiliations that comes of being the smallest kid in class who everyone knows won’t fight back. To the disappointment of my father I stopped the application process for the navy. As I pondered what to do next, I asked myself what other values might come from my newfound pacifism. Over the next few years I explored various leads and — being in the Philadelphia area — started running into Quakers, some of whom had a kind of inner conviction I found intriguing.
So while I was far too young to ever worry about a draft, I did have a similar defining “what do I believe” moment as a teenager. As Ron says in our author chat podcast:
That was a turning point in my life. I made decisions from filling out those forms and answering those questions actually made concrete what I had inside me, ideally. You think about this and think about that and whether or not you hold it true. But when you have to put it all on paper and you have to submit it to the world, it changes you. And I’ve lived by that philosophy since that age. I’ve done it in my educational experience with children. I’ve done it in my private life with friends, caregiving others. My wife and I have been doing that, you know, for decades.
One of the roles of faith is to remember that we’ve been here before. We’ve been the wandering Jews lost in the desert but fed manna to survive. We remember the disciples taken by surprise by the rush of Roman guards come to arrest our Messiah, who urged us to put away our swords. We tell stories of a young George Fox wandering England looking for spiritual teachers until all his “hopes in them and in all men were gone.” We survive by telling stories. We keep ourselves centered and calm by remembering others who found a path through uncertainty and assured us they were held up by a Comforter.
There’s a new top-five list of articles from Friends Journal so far in 2025. We have a couple of news ones — the lawsuits against DHS and the recent Quaker Walk — but we also have more contemplative fair.
I like the story of the Friends at William Penn University in Iowa discovering some of the positive qualities of plain dress from a internet challenge. And Gail Melix (Greenwater)‘s reflection on being both Quaker and Indigenous is quite moving.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and Friends in Business sponsored a two-person panel last night called “Quaker Voices, Digital Paths” and featuring Gloria Sullivan, who has over 600,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, and Griffin Macaulay, content creator for Dungeons and Dragons. Gloria doesn’t generally talk about being a Quaker on her channel but did in January. It’s had over 300,000 views and a staggering 6,042 comments.
The scale of the newer forms of online media is really staggering, as is the simplicity of starting a channel. There’s no need to incorporate or find funders or write mission statements: you just start talking to the computer. It quickly becomes all-consuming of course, and there’s a lot of thought that goes into the topics and scope of the channel. All the popular TikToks also have lots of edits to speed them up. It’s a lot of work to do this part or full-time.
Griffin talked about being known for a thing and remaining passionate about it even in a vacuum. It’s the follow-your-passion advice: loving what you do will pull people to you and you will find a way to turn it into a business.
In some ways, I feel that at least some of the work my colleagues and I are doing 1is akin to an outfielder scanning the sky for pop balls coming in from these internet mentions. When a popular influencer talks about Quakers I’m sure hundreds of fingers open a new tab to ask “What is a Quaker?” and “What Do Quakers Believe?” We hopefully show up in the search with easily-digestible answers and links to Quaker communities. I asked Gloria and Griffin for ideas about how we could better support inquirers they might send our way. We’re doing a lot already — good search engine optimization, catchy URLs — but there was some good advice on using Instagram better and really simplifying our messaging and turning it into stories.
I wrote the introductory column for the June/July issue of Friends Journal, which is devoted to revivals.
It’s my pet theory that Quakerism is always dying and simultaneously always being reborn. It’s been a messy process with lots of hurt feelings. Many people have left Friends, and there are a bewildering number of institutional schisms still dividing us. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.
In the past couple of of months I’ve noticed various Friends using this image of Margaret Fox as a stand-in for Margaret Fell, the so-called “mother” of Quakerism who later married George Fox. Unfortunately it’s a few centuries late. This picture is Margaret Fox of Hydesville, N.Y. It’s from an 1885 book called The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, in which she and her family describe their haunted house. Their three daughters, Margaretta, Kate, and Leah, became known as the Fox Sisters, and became the most famous trio in nineteenth-century Spiritualism. In later years Margaretta admitted the hauntings were hoaxes, alas.
There is a Quaker connection, as the sisters helped convince leading radical Hicksites Amy and Isaac Post to adopt Spiritualism and start communing with the dead. Issac later wrote “spirit writings” under the bylines of people like George Fox and Benjamin Franklin.2 It would be super easy to make fun of the Posts but they also opened their home as an Underground Railroad stop and were personal friends of William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass (who they helped escape to Canada after he was implicated in the John Brown raid at Harper’s Ferry). They were leading figures in what became known as the Progressive Friends movement, whose energy is still palpable in Liberal Quaker circles.
The internet being what it is, there are plenty of websites that have taken this out of context and presented it as Margaret Fell Fox. Unfortunately there are no contemporary images of Margaret Fell. The best we have is a twentieth-century representation of her by Robert Spence, who over thirty years made a number of charming line drawings of the life of George Fox (Friends Journal used one for an illustration in a recent article).
I am writing this post simply to show up in future search results. If I can prevent one person from mistakenly using this image as an illustration or basis for a piece of art then it will have been worth it.
Also, FYI, this is what portraits looked like in Margaret Fell’s time:
www.youtube.com
