“In my travels and experience with Quakers today, I encounter Friends who are going deeper, learning more about the radical faith roots of our faith community, and are willing and able to hear others’ voices and experiences with “listening in tongues” (learning to translate others’ words about the Holy into language that speaks to their own condition). I believe this under-the-radar Quaker revival will continue to deepen and grow in many ways and many places. However, to my mind a great and lasting Quaker revival will require us to do the following:”
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ friends
Friends Journal Being Ready for the Seekers
June 5, 2025
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.
Hometown Heroes
May 22, 2018
Josh Talbot is back looking at public recognitions that imply that patriotism is exclusive to military service:
Within the last month I became aware of the “Hometown Heroes” program. Hanging from lampposts in our downtown, and other downtown districts in the region, are banners with the pictures and names of former military personnel. I was looking at one of the banners hanging outside of my bank and I started thinking to myself. “Why is it always soldiers?
Off the top of my head I can think of plenty of other members of the community that are heros from my standpoint. Activists for justice and conscience. Civic-minded gadflies. Shopowners who provide so-called “third places” for for people to congregegate. Traffic engineers who push back against corner-cutting in safety issues. The most important heros are often everyday people who simply do the right thing when chance puts a dangerous moral dilemma right in their path.
I push back against a simple military-are-heros narratives because in times of authoritarianism the military often become the enforcers. There’s the jingoistic nonsense you hear that the military is protecting our freedom to protest. No: in most cases our liberty has been preserved by people standing up and practicing their liberty despitee intimidation by authoritarian bullies and their police forces. I have friends in the military and I respect their choices and honor their commitments. I know heros can be found throughout the enlisted ranks and in our police forces but so are scoundrels. We need to recognize hometown heroism wherever it happens and resist the mindset that it’s exclusive to state forces.
https://quakerreturns.blogspot.com/2018/05/hometown-heroes.html
Skeletons (not even) in the closet
May 22, 2018
This is a bit a grusome story, though not as shocking at it should be. Louellen White, a researcher looking for burial records of Native American children stumbled on a Native American skull just sitting in a display case of a old Philadelphia meeting.
As White searched for graveyard ledgers in the library — crammed with stuffed birds, clothing, shells and books — she came upon the skull. Her legs wobbled. And her stomach dropped. Arsenault-Cote offered advice and reassurance. “You’re out there looking for them, and now they’re showing themselves to you,” she told White. “He’s been waiting a long time.” Historically, Philadelphia Quakers were “inconsistent friends” to Indians, engaged in the same colonizing projects as other faiths while seeing themselves as uniquely able to educate natives.
Inconsistent is an apt word. Paula Palmer has been tracing the history of Quaker Indian Boarding Schools: high-minded enterprises that often forcably stripped heritage from their pupils in ways that were as culturally imperial as they were unaware.
Byberry Meeting dates to the 1690s and the meetinghouse grounds are full of abolitionist history. The skull was apparently dug up in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a nearby canal project and is thought to have come to the meetinghouse as part of a collection from a shuttered historical society. Its presence on the shelf represents the attitudes of Friends many decades ago who thought nothing of placing a Lenape skull in a case. There’s also the sad subtext that the meeting library is said to be so unused that most of the meeting’s contemporary members had no idea it was there. It’s a shame that it took an outside researcher to notice the skeletons in our display case.
https://www.philly.com/philly/news/483072571.html
Regarding Pronouns
April 20, 2018
On QuakerQuaker, Kirby Urner starts a discussion on pronouns which is not the discussion you might expect:
I pay a lot of attention to pronoun use. People often say “our nuclear weapons” and/or “what we did in Vietnam”. I don’t have any nuclear weapons, nor do my friends.
Kirby’s lost reminds of the classic “What do you mean we, white man” Lone Ranger / Tonto joke.
Part of the deal of the modern nation state and its trappings of democracy is that we all own it together. The peasantry could be lacksidaisical when they were jiat doing the bidding of whichever duke/warlord/king controlled the plot of land in which their ancestral village now sat. But now we fight national wars because the state is us. It’s mostly a load of huey but it disarms what should be the natural Christian (and plain human) distaste for jingoistic tribalism.
http://www.quakerquaker.org/m/discussion?id=2360685%3ATopic%3A159446
April 5, 2018
Whereas the young man heretofore has been given to be something wild, he of late years was become more somber, it was proposed by friends to the young man and woman:
Whether he did believe yet was the truth which we professed and walked in according to our measure — further shewing that if wee did not walk in the truth according to our measure given us, we were but a community of men and women, and not a Church of Christ.
Decline and persistence, part two
March 2, 2018
So much to chew on in Johan Maurer’s Decline and persistence, part two. Find a good chair and take the time to read.
Friends theology strips away all irrelevant social distinctions, giving us the potential for radical hospitality, but that requires us to neutralize elitist signals of all kinds with a hunger to taste heaven’s diversity here and now. If it takes a whole new conversion to give us the necessary freedom and emotional range in place of old class anxieties, so be it.
http://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/03/decline-and-persistence-part-two.html
80s Flashback Time
November 10, 2016
Some of my younger friends are freaking out about Trump, wondering how we’ll get through his presidency. For those of us of a certain age though this is deja vu, a return to the days of Ronald Reagan. Though many people lionize him in retrospect, he was a train wreck through and through.
I was young when he came into office and my only memory of his first term is being interrupted in gym class to an announcement he had been shot in an assassination attempt. My first inkling of him as a politician came from a high school social studies teacher Roy Buri who constantly made fun of Reagan’s statements and policies. I laughed at Buri’s characterizations but I also began to internalized them. He was a legend at the school and had reportedly provided a safe haven in the 1970s for students organizing against the Vietnam War. Retro bonus: he even looked a bit like Bernie Sanders!
When I graduated and moved onto a mostly conservative college, I would stay late at nights in a basement lounge talking with friends in about how we could deal with the era we were living. I remember an epiphany that even though the media were telling us to believe certain things because that was the mainstream national discourse, we didn’t have to. We could be independent in our actions and convictions. Yes, that seems obvious now but it was a major realization then.
So what did we do? We protested. We spoke out. We knew government wasn’t on our side. For those losing friends to AIDS, there was deep mourning and righteous anger. There was a melancholy. A lot of my world felt underground and gritty. I started writing, editing a underground weekly paper on campus (really the start of my career). I figured out that the geography department was full of lefties and spent enough time there to earn a minor. Most of all, I worked to de-normalize the Reagan and Bush St Administrations – the deep corruption of many of its officials and the heartlessness of its policies.
