Full show notes for my interview can be found here.

Bonus: we’ve been working on expanding our international inclusion in the magazine and an article from Salvadoran Jasson Arevalo on the role of Quaker pastors is the first fruits of our new Latin American correspondent’s outreach efforts.

It’s pay-as-led so come join us if you’re available. When it starts depends on where you are of course. It’s 11:00 am here on the U.S. East Coast, which translates to 4pm UK time and 8am Pacific Time. It will last about two hours. You can sign up with either Woodbrooke or Pendle Hill.

This is based on the Illuminate Bible study curriculum put out by Barclay Press. I wrote for the issue on “Christ in Creation,” which you can purchase as a physical or electronic book.

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’ve written before¹ that I’m not a fan of the “when to speak in meeting” flowcharts Friends sometimes post in the meetinghouse to discourage vocal ministry. One is expected to test an incoming message against half a dozen queries and only speak if they can clear them all in the space of an hour. A lot of newcomers see these and decide to just keep quiet.

Christine Hartmann was just one of these new attenders. She writes “after studying all this, I decided to hold off speaking in meeting, if at all possible, for fear of getting it wrong.” She was so careful and so scrupulous that her silence almost cost her her life. I’m not kidding. Literally. Read the article. Wild, wild.

(Yes, there are disruptive newcomers who give inappropriate ministry in Quaker worship. In my experience they’re rarely the ones sitting down and studying flowcharts. The visitors these charts deter are the careful and thoughtful ones who are already tying themselves in knots wondering whether they should speak. These are the folks you want to encourage.)

Health and the Quaker Community — A Life-Changing Lesson from Silence

A medical emergency during Quaker worship reshapes one Friend’s view of ministry, community, and the sacred responsibility of…

Friends Journal

Penn was a man of paradoxical qualities. He espoused a radically egalitarian Quaker theology, insisting that something divine resided within each individual, yet he owned slaves on his American estate. He praised representative institutions such as parliament and the jury system, but spent years in hiding for his loyalty to an absolutist king. ‘I am like to be an adopted American,’ he wrote shortly after arriving in Pennsylvania in 1682, but spent only four of his remaining 36 years there. And he was chronically incapable of managing money, spending eight months in an English debtors’ prison in his 60s, even while his colony quickly became a commercial success.

https://aeon.co/ideas/hes-not-the-guy-on-quaker-oats-hes-much-more-interesting

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