Tag Archives ⇒ lot

What do Quaker believe anyway?

July 19, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Answer quick­ly: what are three things Quak­ers believe? Unless you’ve prac­ticed an answer to this ques­tion, chances are you’ll end up with a lot of umm’s and ahh’s and sen­tences so built up with dis­claimers that your lis­ten­er has to start sen­tence dia­gram­ming just to fig­ure out if you actu­al­ly answered. Arthur Larrabee got frus­trat­ed by the seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble task for explain­ing mod­ern Quak­er beliefs and decid­ed to do some­thing about it:

About 9 years ago I began to give voice to a life­long frus­tra­tion of mine. The frus­tra­tion was that I can­not answer the ques­tion “What do Quak­ers believe?” I would always answer the ques­tions some­what defen­sive­ly. I would say, “it’s kind of hard to know what Quak­ers believe, but let me tell you what I believe.” Or I would say, “well, it’s hard to know what Quak­ers believe today but let me tell you what Quak­ers believed at the begin­ning.” Or I would say what I thought Quak­ers believed and I would hope that no one else was lis­ten­ing because I did not want to be overcalled.

I think Arthur does a pret­ty good job tack­ling a very tough task. He bare­ly even men­tions Howard Brin­ton’s “SPICES.”

9 Core Quak­er Beliefs

Regarding Pronouns

April 20, 2018
· Martin Kelley

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

Risking Community

April 20, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Gregg Kosel­ka, a post that rewards read­ing a few times: Risk­ing Community

When I look around, there is still so much hurt that needs to be processed. There are still real dif­fer­ences in phi­los­o­phy about how to build com­mu­ni­ty. Some see how much needs to rad­i­cal­ly change so that those who have been mar­gin­al­ized can tru­ly be safe and have agency, and so want to go slow­ly to build it cor­rect­ly. Some see the dam­age hav­ing no com­mu­ni­ty can bring, and want to do what they can to build some­thing as safe­ly as pos­si­ble. I hate that these dif­fer­ences are still caus­ing dam­age to our rela­tion­ships and our com­mu­ni­ties. I don’t have a solution.

I appre­ci­ate the way he tries to under­stand the flip sides of com­mu­ni­ty and insti­tu­tion­al­ism; per­haps schism could be seen as the moment they can no longer be nego­ti­at­ed. As pas­tor of one of the “most insti­tu­tion­al of insti­tu­tion­al church­es for 15 years,” he was in the cen­ter of the cen­trifu­gal forces that tore apart both North­west Year­ly Meet­ing as a whole and indi­vis­i­ble Friends church­es with­in it. From a dis­tance of 3000 miles and 150 years of diverg­ing Quak­er his­to­ry, I’m not in a posi­tion to say whether things could have gone dif­fer­ent­ly or whether indi­vid­u­als always act­ed in their best ways but I can appre­ci­ate that it there must have been a lot of impos­si­ble choic­es and no-good answers as polar­iza­tion gave way to disintegration.

Risk­ing Community

Quakers and Mental Health

March 29, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Well this one hits home for me. The new Quak­er­S­peak talks to Ore­gon social work­er Melody George in the top­ic of Quak­ers and Men­tal Health:

I real­ly see men­tal diver­si­ty as a gift to a com­mu­ni­ty, and that the folks that I serve and that I’ve worked with are very resilient. If they tell you their sto­ries about how they’ve got­ten through their trau­mat­ic sit­u­a­tions and what’s helped them to keep going, faith is a huge part of that. And we have a lot to learn from their strength and resilience.

My fam­i­ly has had very avoid­able and out-of-nowhere con­flicts at two reli­gious spaces — one a Friends meet­ing and the oth­er a Pres­by­ter­ian church — over easy acco­mo­da­tions for my son Fran­cis. It seems like many of the dynam­ics that we’ve seen are not dis­sim­i­lar to those that keep oth­ers out of meet­ing com­mu­ni­ties. Who are we will­ing to adapt for? Is com­fort and famil­iar­i­ty our main goal?

Melody also wrote for Friends Jour­nal a few years ago, Imag­in­ing a Trauma-informed Quak­er Com­mu­ni­ty.

The Seed as Quaker metaphor

March 28, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Jnana Hod­son’s blog, a look at “The Seed” as a Quak­er metaphor:

Con­sid­er­ing today’s empha­sis on indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, plu­ral­i­ty, and per­son­al psy­chol­o­gy, I believe that return­ing to the metaphor of the Seed holds the most poten­tial for fer­tile spir­i­tu­al devel­op­ment and guid­ance in our own era.

I find the evo­lu­tion of Quak­er metaphors fas­ci­nat­ing. Ear­ly Quak­er ser­mons and epis­tles were packed with bib­li­cal allu­sions. I grew up rel­a­tive­ly unchurched but I’ve tried to make up for it over the years. I’ve read the Bible cover-to-cover using the One Year Bible plan (like a lot of peo­ple I sus­pect, it took me a lit­tle over two years) and have been part of dif­fer­ent denom­i­na­tion­al Bible study groups. I try to look up ref­er­ences. But even with that I don’t catch half the ref­er­ences ear­ly ser­mons packed in.

John Wool­man lived a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions after the first Friends. We Quak­er remem­ber his Jour­nal for min­istry of its anti-slavery sen­ti­ments, final­ly becom­ing a con­sen­sus among Friends by the time of its pub­li­ca­tion in 1774. But oth­er reli­gious folks have read it for its lit­er­ary val­ue. Open a ran­dom page and Wool­man will have up to half a dozen metaphors for the Divine. It’s packed and rich and acces­si­ble. I find a kind of par­tic­u­lar Quak­er spir­i­tu­al truth in Wool­man’s rota­tion of metaphors: it implies that divin­i­ty is more than any spe­cif­ic words we try to stuff it into.

Late­ly Quak­er metaphors have tend­ed to become more ster­ile. I think we’re still wor­ried about specifics but instead of expand­ing our lan­guage we con­tract it into a kind of impen­e­tra­ble code. The “Light of Christ” becomes the “Inward Christ” then the “Inward Light” then “the Light” or “Spir­it.” We’re still echo­ing the Light metaphors packed into the Book of John but doing so in such a way that seems par­tic­u­lar­ly parochial to Friends and non-obvious to new­com­ers. A major New Tes­ta­ment theme is reduced to Quak­er lingo.

Jnana Hod­son’s prob­lem with “the seed” as metaphor is inter­est­ing: “ ‘seed,’ as such, has far few­er Bib­li­cal cita­tions than the cor­re­spond­ing com­ple­men­tary ‘light’ or ‘true’ and ‘truth’ do.” I’m not sure I ever noticed that. I like the seed, with its organ­ic con­no­ta­tions and promise of future growth.  But appar­ent­ly the few bib­li­cal allu­sions were rather sex­ist (spoil­er: it often meant semen) and lack­ing in bio­log­i­cal aware­ness. It feels like Friends are search­ing for neu­tral metaphors like “the seed” these days; we also have a lot of gath­er­ings around “weav­ing.” I cer­tain­ly don’t think we should be lim­it­ed to first cen­tu­ry images of divin­i­ty but I also don’t think we’ve quite fig­ured out how we can talk about the guid­ance we receive from the Inward Teacher.

The Seed, ini­tial­ly, is the most prob­lem­at­ic of the three cen­tral Quak­er metaphors

Mixing Quakers & Politics

March 19, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Greg Woods is the pri­ma­ry mover behind this Thurs­day’s live pan­el of Quak­er con­gres­sion­al can­di­dates. He’s writ­ten a new post about it, Quak­ers & Pol­i­tics Do Mix (in the 2018 Midterms)

This year’s elec­tion feel dif­fer­ent than pre­vi­ous years. Peo­ple are ready to do some­thing besides just vot­ing. Many are run­ning for office in record num­bers, for exam­ple: Sci­en­tists and Women.Another pop­u­la­tion that is run­ning in, per­haps, record num­bers in 2018: Quakers!

He’s added a lot of inter­est­ing con­tex­tu­al links to arti­cles about the new types of can­di­dates we’re see­ing in the 2018 election.

To make sure you get the lat­est infor­ma­tion on the live pan­el, sign up for the live web pan­el’s Face­book event. And join us at 3pm ET for our live web pan­el. We’ll also be con­tin­u­ing to update the Friends Jour­nal announce­ment page.

The Art of Persuasion

March 16, 2018
· Martin Kelley

The Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing high­lights artists, includ­ing Signe Wilkin­son and Ramona Sharples, in The Art of Per­sua­sion:

“I was think­ing about (emo­tion and art) recent­ly as I was going through all my comics, and there is a rhythm that is very slow and qui­et. It’s not very actiony comics that I’m draw­ing … because … a lot of the feel­ings that I am describ­ing are melan­choly, and that plays a role in the way that my comics are presented.”