Before 2012, the mix had been flipped for years: two annual special issues, with the rest a catch-all from the incoming submission slush pile. I feel that more frequent themes have helped us steer clear of the rut of repeating the same articles on a too-frequent basis. We’re also seeing more articles consciously written for us (as opposed to be shopped around to various progressive publications). Most importantly from an editorial perspective, the process  also forces us to reach out to people, directly and on social media, to encourage them to write. One of my never-ending, never- reachable goals, is to always be encouraging new voices in the magazine. This is one tool to help get there.

We’ve already started getting feedback from individuals that their favorite cause isn’t covered in this latest list. I’m okay with that. We don’t cover everything every round. Core concerns of Friends get covered on a regular basis in the non-themed issues. Some authors are also really creative in finding a hook to bring their cause into seemingly unrelated topic. Also, I think we’ve covered all of the major topics in the last seven years—sometimes multiple times—and those articles are still be read and shared and commented on.

Many of these themes come from reader suggestions. Others come from more random conversations we have. One of my favorite this time is the issue on Gambling. That was inspired one late-January 2018 morning when a new Friend called in to ask us if we had any articles on the topic. Apparently, she had been chastised at meeting that weekend for suggesting there should be a prize for whoever guessed the correct number of valentine candy hearts in a jar. She wanted to understand the Quaker testimonies. Much to my surprise there hadn’t been much in recent Friends Journal articles. I randomly asked on Facebook whether we had “essentially dropped” our testimony on gambling. The resultant Facebook thread quickly made it obvious that Friends have an issue-worthy amount of feelings on the topic.

Have fun looking over the list. If you have suggestions, let me know (I will write them down and remember). If you want to encourage people to write, please please do. Also, send me a message if you want to get on a monthly email list in which I promote an upcoming writing deadline. The next coming up in for March’s issue, Outside the Meetinghouse.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

The archival material in the Library relating to William Penn includes property deeds relating to land in Pennsylvania, such as the one pictured below. There are also letters from William Penn amongst other people’s papers. One notable example, dated 13th of 11th month 1690 (13 January 1691, in the modern calendar), is a letter from him to Margaret Fox, formerly Margaret Fell, telling her of the death of her husband, George Fox.

William Penn: commemorations and curios

It sounds like there have been lots of momentos made from the elm tree under which William Penn is said to have signed a treaty with the Lenape in 1683. The Penn Treaty Park museum has stirring accounts of the storm that tore the tree from its roots in 1810. There were so many relic hunters hacking off pieces of the fallen tree that the owners of the property owners hired a guard. Their solution was the obvious capitalist one: chop the remainder up and sell it.

According to an article on the Haverford College site, cuttings of the original tree were taken in its lifetime and trees have been propagated from its lineage for a few generations now. Haverford recently planted a “great grandchild” of the original treaty elm on its campus to replace a fallen grandchild. Newtown Meeting in nearby Bucks County has a great great grandchild.

The idea of Quaker relics and trees imbued with special properties because of a lineage of placement doesn’t really jive very well with many Friends’ ideas of the Quaker testimonies. But I’m glad that the treaty is remembered. The tree had served as a sort of memorial; with its demise, a group came together to more properly remember the location and commemorate the treaty.

The NYYM Friends who have shared their stories herein are farmers, chaplains, hydrogeologists, shepherds, mystics, homesteaders, local government officials, naturalists, professors, and Master Gardeners. They till the soil, herd the sheep, insulate walls, minister unto many, commune with nature, educate, and model resilience in Ithaca, Brooklyn, Clinton, East Chatham, and Seneca Castle in New York, and in Highland Park and Montclair in New Jersey.

I still have to go through them myself. Some that look particularly interesting are Susanna Mattingly’s Quakers and Climate Change:

This is a spiritual call as well as a material one, to act not out of fear or through accusation, but with hope and love. We recognize sustainability and care for the earth are integral to our faith and our Quaker testimonies as we strive to live in right relationship with all creation. As a community, we can make a meaningful contribution to stabilizing the climate and building resilience.

Christopher Sammond’s “Our Generation’s ‘Lamb’s War’ “:

As I have held questions about how to respond to the divisiveness, the fear mongering, the racism, and the tsunami of lies and half-truths characterizing our nation’s political life at this time, I have been clearly and deeply called to go deep, and to join the many, many people of faith who are seeking to bring about the necessary shift in culture, a shift in spiritual consciousness, which is necessary if we are to survive as a species. And, like my Quaker forebears, I know that work to begin within myself.

It profiles Henderson Luelling (1809–1878) and it’s not exactly an academic source. Here’s a snippet:

Luelling had taken up with these groovy Free Lovers, whom he met in San Francisco. From the outset, the journey had complications. “Dr.” Tyler, it turned out, was actually an ex-blacksmith who now professed expertise in water-cures and clairvoyance. One of the men was fleeing financial troubles, and when the ship was searched by police he hid under the hoopskirt of a female passenger.

Luelling’s life follows many common themes of mid-nineteenth century Quaker life:

• He was a horticulturalist, first moving to the Portland, Oregon, area and then to a small town near Oakland, California. Friends had long been interested in botanical affairs. Roughly a century earlier John Bartram was considered one of the greatest botanists of his generation.
• Luelling moved from Indiana to Salem, Iowa in the 1830s and became a staunch abolitionist, even building hideouts for the Underground Railroad in his house. Wikipedia reports he was expelled from his meeting for this.
• He got Oregon fever and moved his operation out there.
• At some point in this he became interested in Spiritualism and its offshoots like the Free Love movement. This was not a Quaker movement but the modern American movement started with the Fox Sisters in Upstate New York and was heavily promoted by Quaker Hicksites Amy and Isaac Post.

If you want to know more about Luelling’s “sex cults,” this article in Offbeat Oregon feels much better sourced: The father of Oregon’s nursery industry and his “Free Love” cult:

The “free love” thing is far from new. Over the years, especially in the American West, at least half a dozen generations have produced at least one “daring” philosopher who calls for a throwing-off of the age-old yoke of marriage and family and urges his or her followers to revert to the mythic “noble savage” life of naked and unashamed people gathering freely and openly, men and women, living and eating and sleeping together with no rules, no judgment and no squabbles over paternity.

He’d also started his very own free-love cult — “The Harmonial Brotherhood.” Luelling’s group made free love the centerpiece of a strict regimen of self-denial that included an all-vegetarian, stimulant-free diet, cold-water “hydropathy” for any medical need, and a Utopian all-property-in-common social structure.

Portland Friend Mitchel Santine Gould has written about some of these currents as well. His LeavesofGrass.org site used to have a ton of source material. Digging into one day it seemed pretty clear that the Free Love movement was also a refuge of sorts for those who didn’t fit strict nineteenth-century heterosexuality or gender norms. Gould’s piece, Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox has a bit of this, with talk of “lifelong bachelors.”

Many of the Spiritualist leaders were young women and their public lecture series were pretty much the only public lectures by young women anywhere in America. If you want to learn more about these developments I recommend Ann Braud’s Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. These communities were very involved in abolitionist and women’s rights issues and often started their own yearly meetings after becoming too radical for the Hicksites.

And lest we think all this was a West Coast phenomenon, my little unprepossessing South Jersey town of Hammonton was briefly a center of Free Love Spiritualism (almost completely scrubbed from our history books) and the nearby town of Egg Harbor City had extensive water sanitariums of the kind described in these articles.

My blog at Quaker Ranter dates back to the proto-blog I began in 1997 as an new homepage for my two year old “Nonviolence Web” project. The new feature was updated weekly with excerpted material from member projects on Nonviolence.org and related organizations that already had independent websites. We didn’t have RSS or Twitter then but I would manually send out emails to a list; we didn’t have comments but I would publish interesting responses that came by email. The work was relaunched with blogging software in 2003 and the voice became more individual and my focus became more Quaker and tech.

The articles then were like they are now: reversely chronological, with categories, tagging, and site searching that allow older material to be accessed. The most important source of archive visibility is external: Google. People can easily find material that is directly relevant to a question they’re addressing right now. In many instances, they’ll never even click through to the site homepage, much less categories, tags, etc. As I said in my last post, these first-time visitors are often trying to understand something new; the great majority bounce off the page and follow another search result on a matter of a few seconds, but some small but important percentage will be ripe for new ideas and connections and might be willing to try new associations.

But it’s random. I’m a bit of a nerd in my chosen interests and have been blogging long enough that I generally have at least a few interesting posts on any particular sub-topic. Most of these have been inspired by colleagues, friends, my wife, and random conversations I’ve found myself in.

Some of the most meaningful blog posts–those with legs–have involved me integrating some new thinker or idea into my worldview. The process will have started months or sometimes years before when another spiritual nerd recommended a book or article. In the faith world there’s always books that are obscure to newcomers but essential for those trying to go deeper into their faith. You’ll be in a deep conversations with someone and they’ll ask (often with a twinkle in their eye) “have you read so-and-so?” (This culture if sharing is especially important for Friends, who traditionally have no clergy or seminaries).

A major role of my blog has been to bring these sorts of conversations into a public realm–one that can be Googled and followed. The internet has helped us scale-up this process and make it more available to those who can’t constantly travel.

When I have real-world conversations now, I often have recourse to cite some old blog post. I’m sharing the “have you read” conversation in a way that can be eavesdropped by hundreds.

But how are people who stumble in my site for the first time going to find this?

The issue isn’t just limited to an obscure faith blog. Yesterday I learned about a cool (to me) blog written by a dad who researches and travels to neat nature spots in the area with his kids and writes up a post about what-to-see and kid-issues-to-be-aware-of. But when it’s a nice Saturday afternoon and I find myself in a certain locale, how can I know if he’s been anywhere nearby unless I go through all the archives or hope the search works or hope his blog’s categorization taxonomy is complete?

What I’m thinking is that we could try to create meta indexes to our blogs in a wiki model. Have a whole collection of introductory pages where we list and summarize relevant articles with links.

In the heyday of SEO, I used to tag the heck out if posts and have the pages act as a sort of automated version of this, but again, this it was chronological. And it was work. Even remembering to tag is work. I would spend a couple of days ignoring clients to metatag each page on the site, only to redo the work a few months later with even more metadata complexity. Writing a whole shadow meta blog indexing the blog would be a major (and unending task). It wouldn’t garner the rush of immediate Facebook likes. But it would be supremely useful for someone wanting to explore an issue of particular interest to them at that moment.

And one more Quaker aside that I think will nevertheless be of interest to the more techie readers. I’ve described Quakerism as a wiki spirituality. Exhibit one is the religious movement’s initial lack of creeds or written instruction. Even our pacifism, for which we’re most well known, was an uncodified testimony in the earliest years.

As Friends gained more experience living in community, they would publish advices–short snippets of wisdom that were collectively-approved using consensus decision making. They were based on experience. For example, they might find that members who abused alcohol, say, or repeatedly tested the dress code might cause other sorts of problems for the community and they’d minute a warning against these practices.

These advices were written over time; as more were approved it became burdensome to find relevant advices when some issue started tearing up a congregation. So they were collected into books–unofficial at first, literally hand-copied from person to person. These eventually became official–published “books of disciplines,” collections of the collective wisdom organized by topic. Their purpose and scope (and even their name) has changed over the ensuing centuries but their impulse and early organization is one that I find useful when thinking about how we could rethink the categorization issues of our twenty first century blogs and commenting systems.

The restaurant chain Red Robin recently made a fifteen-second TV ad whose joke is that its veggie-burgers are perfect for customers whose teenage daughters are “going through a phase.” It’s had rather limited airplay (it’s the 450th or so most run ad in the past 30 days) but still, Business Insider ran a piece on it which claimed that “the chain managed to insult all potential vegetarian and vegan customers” with the ad. For evidence, it cited three mild comments on Red Robin’s Facebook page. Fair enough.

But then the page-view-whores at Huffington Post saw the BI piece and wrote that Red Robin is “under fire for dissing vegetarians,” still citing just those Facebook comments. Under fire? For three comments?

Sensing fresh (veggie?) meat, Phillymag links to HuffPost to claim that ”vegetarians and vegans far and wide are freaking out” and that a boycott has been declared. The author tells us that “‘Offended’ gets tossed around so rapidly” and it must be true, right?, as she uses it three more times just in her opening paragraph. It’s a pity that none of the three Facebook commenters were considerate enough to actually use the words “outrage” or “boycott.” One described the ad as “disappointing” (ouch!). Another used the word “dissatisfied” (zing!), though he was speaking not about the ad per se but rather a recent visit to the restaurant.

Seems like if there is an epidemic of offended-ness going on, we might take a look at the desperation of what passes for modern journalism these days. Offended-ness must get page views, so why not be offended at being offended? (I imagine some hack further down the pageview food chain is right now reading the Phillymag piece and typing out a headline about the worldwide vegan army issuing a fatwa on the teenage daughters of Red Roof executives.) Is this really the kind of crap that people like to share on Facebook? Do Internet users just not follow links backward to judge if there’s any truth to outrage posts on outrage? I usually ignore this kind of junk even to read past the ridiculous headline. But the phenomenon is all too ubiquitous on the interwebs these days and is really so unnecessarily divisive and stereotype-perpetuating.

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Wess and I have both been uploading lots of photos to Flickr using the “quakerreclaiming2009″ tag. I’ve been uploading my video interviews both on Youtube and QuakerQuaker. You can see them at the reclaiming2009 tag (I have the feeling we’ve just doubled the Quaker content on Youtube but it’s not that extreme). Anyone present with more photos can either upload them to Flickr with the “quakerreclaiming2009” tag or send them directly up to QuakerQuaker. Same with videos.