There are many Friends involved in Choose Democracy but it’s very consciously not a Quaker organization (the word doesn’t even appear on its website). So it’s interesting to hear George share the way his faith and democracy activism intersects:

I’m reminded of early Friends who loved to go to market squares on busy marketing days and stand on a box or stand on something, and preach the gospel as they understood it. And they attracted many people to become Quakers through doing that, including people who initially thought they were talking rubbish. So it’s that going out, it’s that not expecting people to come to us but instead taking that offensive– it’s a mark of the growth of early Quakerism and will be a mark of the growth of today’s Quakerism if we’re willing to go out.

If you think of the Bible as a rulebook, then you’re going to fight about it, because it’s about allocation of power, and the interpreter is always claiming power by saying, “the Bible says you can do this, and you must not do that.” Well, Quakers do not like to think that way.
http://quakerspeak.com/faithfully-translating-the-bible/

So yeah, THAT Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’m going to have Moana songs in my head all day now. See the line where the sky meets THE sea? It calls ME, And no one KNOOOOOWWS, how far it GOOOEEES. (okay, it sounds better when my 8yo daughter sings along in the car).

Nicole Cliffe is a former atheist turned Christian (but AFAIK, not Quaker (yet)) who told her conversion story in Christianity Today a few years ago. One of her claims to fame is co-founding The Toast, which stop publishing in 2016 but still has someone paying for the web server.

And in case Lin-Manuel swings by, he should know that history geek Quaker hip hop is a thing.

I am going to make a bold apology for a clarified liberal Quaker identity that retains its roots and recovers worship in the spirit of Christ, but yet releases us from the orthodox Christian preoccupations that no longer speak to so many unprogrammed Friends.

Are Quakers Christian?

When Quakers talk about the prophetic tradition, we tend to go back to early Friends, but I am going to go back to Jeremiah.

https://www.ashleymwilcox.com/blog/2019/4/14/quakers-and-the-prophetic-tradition

I thought I had wandered into a group of people who actually believed that God was able to speak directly to them. I remember saying, “Oh my God, this is Pentecost!” I couldn’t believe that these people think God is actually glllllloing to speak to them! I’m down for this. This is where I belong.

Most of the Quakers reading this can probably guess where this is going–she pretty quickly got a lesson in the unwritten norms against exuberance at many Quaker meetings, the rules that prevent many expressions of worship. Ayesha’s Black and many of the strictures on behavior are pretty middle-class white. But a lot of this isn’t really about race. I’ve been led to do some very non-ordinary things at uptight Quaker meetings and feeling incredibly self-conscious over it. When I came to Friends, I loved the idea of the radical spontenaeity of our worship (anyone can minister anytime!) and the life it called us to but in practice we often are creatures of habit, to our detriment. I love Ayesha’s talk of “experimenting with freedom” and the “liberty of the spirit.” I realize my stories of non-ordinariness are all over a decade old. I wish I felt more of that liberty again.

http://quakerspeak.com/how-does-culture-influence-quaker-worship/

In the light of our high ideals, it can be hard for individual Quakers not to feel inadequate. I certainly do. We’re exhorted to “let our lives speak”, and I often feel like my life doesn’t have much to say. But I am a writer. As a community that listens patiently for the truth, Quakers provide a unique place for creativity. The faith that can sit through hours of Meeting – through boredom, frustration, distraction – is the same thing that keeps me going when I’m struggling for my next idea. We worship in silence, but we’re waiting for words, which somehow gives me faith that, if I wait in front of a blank page for long enough, the right story will come.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/09/top-10-quakers-in-fiction?CMP=twt_gu

Despite the risks, Rustin felt it was his responsibility to be open about his sexuality. He traces that duty back to an experience he had as a black man in the 1940s Jim Crow South, when he took his place at the back of a segregated bus.

“As I was going by the second seat to go to the rear, a white child reached out for the ring necktie I was wearing and pulled it,” he recalled in the newly released audio. “Whereupon its mother said, ‘Don’t touch a n*****.’ ”

As Rustin tells it, here’s what ran through his mind in that moment after the white woman called him the slur: “If I go and sit quietly at the back of that bus now, that child, who was so innocent of race relations that it was going to play with me, will have seen so many blacks go in the back and sit down quietly that it’s going to end up saying, ‘They like it back there, I’ve never seen anybody protest against it.’ ”

Rustin was fired from his work with organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and he often had to work semi-anonymously behind the scenes. The famous March on Washington that we remember for Martin Luther King Jr.‘s speech was Rustin’s idea.

One of his catch-phrases in speeches was that we should “speak truth to power.” When he worked with the American Friends Service Committee to write the famous 1955 pamphlet of that name, not only wasn’t he not listed as one of the authors, but the others concocted some ridiculous story about the phrase being some ancient Quaker saying. Shameful. I really want to listen to his story and can’t wait for the podcast!

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/06/682598649/in-newly-found-audio-a-forgotten-civil-rights-leader-says-coming-out-was-an-abso?fbclid=IwAR3eUSvE9RsHVjgQU3zCmDs6z49bIuK3ijTt1JBznV7BVzpekH7G2kwCm2c