As a lover of maps, I’ve often be intrigued by the environs  of the Delaware River. As the tides go up and down, the timelessness of the river becomes a kind of gentle solace to the industrialization along its banks. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the islands which somehow remain in its course. I’ve camped at Pea Patch Island down by Delaware and found a surprising family connection in its convoluted ownership. But closer to my commute is Petty Island, sitting alongside the New Jersey mainland a short distance north of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Petty Island is owned by the Citgo oil company and until just a few months ago was still dotted with its oil tanks and a large marine cargo facility. Satellite views still show this twentieth century industry. But in a very long and oftentimes-uncertain process it’s due to become part of New Jersey natural lands and eventually to become a preserve. The public is generally still not allowed on the island but there are occasional trips and on this past Saturday I got to tour the island.

We were very lucky to have Bob Shinn as our tour guide. He’s a walking encyclopedia of the island and the state geopolitics and waves of names and commercial uses it’s been through. He literally wrote the entry on Petty Island in the Philadelphia Encyclopedia. Not surprisingly there’s a lot of Quakers in the early recorded history and the deed between the first Quaker owner and three Lenape representatives is intact in the Haverford College collections (this deed was also a major part of a talk by Lenape–settler history given by Jean Soderlund a few months ago at Rancocas Meeting (see also her book Lenape Country)).

The ever-changing, never-settled history of the island continues with its name. Wikipedia, Google Maps, and—most importantly—Bob Shinn call it “Petty Island,” while the guard shack, welcome sign, NJ Audubon Society, and New Jersey Natural Lands Trust adds the possessive to make it “Petty’s Island.” The latter is especially awkward-sounding to my ears, as South Jersey place names characteristically drop the apostrophes over time (for example, the river landing named after Captain George May is now the town of “Mays Landing.”)

Remnants of the industrialization remain: the massive three-story loading facility has been kept to become the bones of a future visitors center; the adjacent asphalt parking area has just been replanted as a meadow and is mostly a lot of rocks and short blades of grass (with some Fowler’s toads!). We were lucky enough to be the first public group to be there since this had all been cleared away.

Bonus: I didn’t realize till we were about to get in our cars that South Jersey Trails was also on the tour. He wrote it up too! If you look carefully, I’m in the background of one of the shots, and now that I’m looking I think that’s him in some of mine.

Food unites and food divides. It both marks us into tribes and gives us opportunities to reach past our societal limits. From chicken barbeques to vegetarian‐dominated potlucks, what we put on the table says a lot about our values, and how we welcome unfamiliar food choices is a measure of our hospitality. How do kitchen‐table spreads of tofu and chickpea dips reinforce certain stand‐apart cultural norms? Are Friends who like barbecue ribs less Quaker? What about meetings that still host the annual chicken dinner or clambake?

Foodways and Folkways

Among Friends: Our introduction to the June-July 2019 issue on Food Choices.

Friends Journal

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/

Many of us find difficulty in facing change. The way a meeting house is arranged and the way Quaker faith is expressed have both changed over time. There have always been those who find it difficult if not impossible to let go of what has gone before. In my local meeting I always sit in the same place and acknowledge that I find change difficult, but in spite of this there are ways in which I have changed.

I suspect part of thr context of this is the hopes and fears of British Friends as they embark on a recision of their book of Faith and Practice. An editing group has recently been named.

https://stumblingstepping.blogspot.com/2019/02/belonging-and-difference.html

I have tended to describe this shift in understanding as the moment when Quakerism “clicked” for me—when it ceased to be just the weird subculture I grew up in, and more a matter of conviction. Practices that I ignored or never quite understood, like making group decisions without taking a vote, now made sense, because they were borne out of an attempt to make Christ the present teacher in all affairs.

Isaac’s piece stems in part from the December Friends Journal, on Quakers and Christianity. A large percentage of the submissions we received for the issue had remarkably similar personal stories: people had grown up in a restrictive religious tradition and come to Liberal Friends because of its openness to spiritual seeking. If anything they were hostile to Christianity and distinctive Quaker peculiarities when they joined but over time they slowly shifted, often after getting to know grounded elder Friends. Now they quietly identified as Christian Friends.

We could have printed a whole issue of (mostly) convinced Liberal Friends who had rediscovered Christianity. Instead we picked a representative sample for the print edition and published the rest as part of our our extended online edition; you can read it all at the online contents. Although Isaac’s story is different (he grew up as a Friend) it shares a similar trajectory.

(Issac also has some questions about Quaker publishing, with a link to a great 2009 blog post from Johan Maurer. I feel I should talk about this issue too but that’ll take a bit more pondering on my part).

Is Quaker Culture an Obstacle to Faith?

Whether you believe in an intelligent Satan (along the lines of Peter Wagner’s ideas) or a more impersonal mechanism of demonic evil (Walter Wink), we shouldn’t pretend that such nodes just go away. Their evil persists. The basis for apology and repentance is not white guilt or shame or any form of self-flagellation. Instead, it is to conduct spiritual warfare against the demons of racism and oppression and false witness, to declare them off-limits in the land that we now share, so that we can conduct our future stewardship—and make our public investments— in freedom and mutual regard.

I’m drawn to the old notion of “The Tempter” as a force that leads us to do what’s personally rewarding rather than morally just. I think it explains a lot of internal struggles I’ve faced, even in simple witnesses. As Johan says, these massive injustices can’t just be undone but they need to be recognized for the immensity of their scale. I’ve also seen this weird way in which progressive whites can blithely disregard Native American perspectives on these issues. Listening more and waiting for complicated answers seems essential in my opinion.

Another good deep-dive for Friends interested in this is Betsy Cazden’s Friends Journal 2006 article, Quaker Money, Old Money, and White Privilege. It’s one I turn to every so often to remind myself of some of our monied Quaker norms. Johan gives a pass to William Penn but I think it’s important to remember that his colonial ambitions were deeply enmeshed in at least three different wars and conveniently served the political calculations of two empires, the perfect storm of an opportunity for a group of pacifist idealists.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/11/quakers-and-native-americans-its.html

It’s hogwash top to bottom, thinly connected dots meant to look like an evil plot. Apparently some people who were involved in Casa de los Amigos in Mexico City later donated to Democratic campaigns and Casa later rented office space to a migrant rights organization in 2012 and… well, that’s pretty much it. Proof that the “international Quaker movement” is the organizers of the refugee caravans aimed at the “destruction of U.S. borders.”

The language is florid in the manner of rightwing conspiracies. They specifically call out Brigid Moix, a former Casa de los Amigos director and well-respected Quaker peace advocate who Friends Journal published just last month. She was at Casa the same time as some guy who wrote something rather obvious about immigration that sounds like something rather obvious other people have since wrote about immigration. Oh and the one guy is now a Mexican ambassador to Greece. And someone was on a conference call. And there’s a group in San Diego. Seriously, there’s not even an attempt to draw a coherent thread. It’s just one non sequitur after another bridging together randomly Googled trivia, all carelessly run together because the author obviously assumes Daily Caller readers don’t read past the headline.

This would all be laughably obtuse in its overreach except that these conspiracies are getting less and less funny every day. The AFSC regularly gets conspiracy webs spun around its work in Palestine but I haven’t seen much trying to tie Friends to the biannual conspiracies around immigration. Hopefully it will fade away and Kassam will find some other bogeyman. The only stitch of truth can be found in the comments. There, buried near the bottom of all the knee-jerk crap you’d expect, is this, left un-ironically I suspect:

From the exterior, there may not appear to be very much different between a group of individuals doing individual meditation or individual contemplation in the same room and a group of Quaker worshiping together. But there are a number of things that are, as we experience them, different. One is that these practices that have as their goal achieving stillness of mind or perfect quiet or single-pointed awareness, as a goal, are actually quite different from what we are attempting and achieving in meeting for worship. For Friends, this point of stillness is only a way station, and we pass though that. It is not our goal, but it is how we get to a point of encounter with God.
 
http://quakerspeak.com/why-do-quakers-worship-in-silence/