Tag Archives ⇒ media

Talking like a Quaker: does anyone really care about schism anymore?

September 28, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Over on my design blog I’ve just post­ed an arti­cle, Bank­ing on rep­u­ta­tions, which looks at how the web­sites for high-profile cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions are often built with­out regard to nat­ur­al web pub­lic­i­ty – there’s no focus on net cul­ture or search engine vis­i­bil­i­ty. The sites do get vis­it­ed, but only because of the rep­u­ta­tion of the insti­tu­tion itself. My guess is that peo­ple go to them for very spe­cif­ic func­tions (look­ing up a phone num­ber, order­ing tick­ets, etc.). I fin­ish by ask­ing the ques­tion, “Are the audi­ences of high brow insti­tu­tions so full of hip young audi­ences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?”

I won’t bela­bor the point, but I won­der if some­thing sim­i­lar is hap­pen­ing with­in Friends. It’s kind of weird that only two peo­ple have com­ment­ed on Johan Mau­r­er’s blog post about Bal­ti­more Year­ly Meet­ing’s report on Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing. Johan’s post may well be the only place where online dis­cus­sion about this par­tic­u­lar report is avail­able. I gave a plug for it and it was the most pop­u­lar link from Quak­erQuak­er, so I know peo­ple are see­ing it. The larg­er issue is dealt with else­where (Bill Samuel has a par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful resource page) but Johan’s piece seems to be get­ting a big yawn.

It’s been super­seded as the most pop­u­lar Quak­erQuak­er link by a light­heart­ed call for an Inter­na­tion­al Talk Like a Quak­er Day put up by a Live­jour­nal blog­ger. It’s fun but it’s about as seri­ous as you might expect. It’s get­ting picked up on a num­ber of blogs, has more links than Johan’s piece and at cur­rent count has thir­teen com­menters. I think it’s a great way to poke a lit­tle fun of our­selves and think about out­reach and I’m hap­py to link to it but I have to think there’s a les­son in its pop­u­lar­i­ty vis-a-vis Johan’s post.

Here’s the inevitable ques­tion: do most Quak­ers just not care about Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing or Bal­ti­more Year­ly Meet­ing, about a mod­ern day cul­ture clash that is but a few degrees from boil­ing over into full-scale insti­tu­tion­al schism? For all my brava­do I’m as much an insti­tu­tion­al Quak­er as any­one else. I care about our denom­i­na­tion­al pol­i­tics but do oth­ers, and do they really?

Year­ly meet­ing ses­sions and more entertainment-focused Quak­er gath­er­ings are lucky if they get three to five per­cent atten­dance. The gov­ern­ing body of my year­ly meet­ing is made up of about one per­cent of its mem­ber­ship; add a per­cent or two or three and you have how many peo­ple actu­al­ly pay any kind of atten­tion to it or to year­ly meet­ing pol­i­tics. A few years ago a Quak­er pub­lish­er com­mis­sioned a promi­nent Friend to write an update to lib­er­al Friends’ most wide­ly read intro­duc­to­ry book and she man­gled the whole thing (down to a total­ly made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after pub­li­ca­tion – even insid­ers don’t care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most con­tem­po­rary Friends post-institutional? The per­cent­age of Friends involved in the work of our reli­gious bod­ies has per­haps always been small, but the divide seems more strik­ing now that the inter­net is pro­vid­ing com­pe­ti­tion. The big Quak­er insti­tu­tions skate on being rec­og­nized as offi­cial bod­ies but if their par­tic­i­pa­tion rate is low, their recog­ni­tion fac­tor small, and their abil­i­ty to influ­ence the Quak­er cul­ture there­fore min­i­mal, then are they real­ly so impor­tant? After six years of mar­riage I can hear my wife’s ques­tion as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the reli­gious author­i­ty of these bod­ies come from? As some­one who sees the world through a sociological/historical per­spec­tive, my ques­tion is com­ple­men­tary but some­what dif­fer­ent: if so few peo­ple care, then is there author­i­ty? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when
a schism might mean the loss of con­trol over a beloved school or camp­ground – fac­tor out
the sen­ti­men­tal fac­tor and what’s left?

I don’t think a dimin­ish­ing influ­ence is a pos­i­tive trend, but it won’t go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in com­mit­tees). How are today’s gen­er­a­tion of Friends going to deal with chang­ing cul­tur­al forces that are threat­en­ing to under­mine our cur­rent prac­tices? And how might we use the new oppor­tu­ni­ties to advance the Quak­er mes­sage and Christ’s agenda?

Pete Seeger gets YouTubed

February 12, 2007
· Martin Kelley

pete seeger album coverThis morn­ing I’m work­ing on the “Pete Seeger”:http://www.quakersong.org/pete_seeger/ sec­tion of Quak​er​song​.org, the web­site of Annie Pater­son and Peter Blood (I’m their web­mas­ter). Parts of their site are amaz­ing – the “Quak­ers and Music”:http://www.quakersong.org/quakers_and_music/ page has become a direc­to­ry of sorts for all the many Quak­er musi­cians out there (who knew there were so many!). But the Pete Seeger is still most­ly a col­lec­tion of CDs that Peter & Annie have for sale.
So I was won­der­ing what a good Pete Seeger page might look like and start­ing surf­ing around. There’s a great “fan page”:http://www.peteseeger.net/ which is reg­u­lar­ly updat­ed but has brave­ly decid­ed to main­tain its orig­i­nal design since it was found­ed eleven years ago. And “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_seeger does its usu­al fine job at a biog­ra­phy. But the “gold mine is YouTube”:http://youtube.com/results?search_query=pete+seeger&search=Search.
A year ago a user uploaded three clips from _Rainbow Quest_, a short-lived TV pro­gram Pete put togeth­er for a low-wattage UHF sta­tion out of Newark in the mid-60s (it’s now a Tele­mu­n­do affil­i­ate broad­cast­ing recy­cled Mex­i­can soaps for its prime time sched­ule). I don’t know what kind of copy­right issues there are on some­thing like this but it’s great fun to see these old clips. Mak­ing this mate­r­i­al wide­ly avail­able is one of the joys of YouTube (well, that and watch­ing “recap­tur­ing the inno­cence of our over-commercialized youth”:http://ofthebest.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-shed-20-years-in-20-seconds.html). I’ll leave you with this, a clip of Pete singing with June Carter and John­ny “I’m soooo stoooned” Cash a few years before they married.

Opening up the QuakerQuaker listings

January 9, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Every­one can now add posts to the Quak­erQuak­er cat­e­go­ry list­ings. Sim­ply book­mark the post in Del​.icio​.us, list the QQ cat­e­gories and it will be added to the page.
For exam­ple, say you’ve seen just the coolest post on Con­ver­gent Friends. Go to the “Con­ver­gent Friends”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/convergent_quakers page to find the right “tag” – in this case “quaker.convergent”. Book­mark the post you like, write a title and descrip­tion and list “quaker.convergent” as its tag. An hour or so lat­er the post will show up on the Con­ver­gent Friends page. How cool is that? Here are “instruc­tion on how to use Del​.icio​.us and title pages”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/contributors_zone_how_to/.

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

Betsy Cazden’s new site

January 5, 2007
· Martin Kelley

I’m pleased to announce that my lat­est free­lance project has just launched: Betsy​Caz​den​.com. There’s noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary about the tech­nol­o­gy behind the site or its design, but the Quak­er geek in me is so hap­py to see it. Long-term read­ers will remem­ber my excit­ed post Fel­low­ship Mod­el of Lib­er­al Quak­ers, writ­ten after read­ing Bet­sy’s Bea­con Hill Friends pam­phlet Fel­low­ships, Con­fer­ences, and Asso­ci­a­tions. Bet­sy is one of the small num­ber of Quak­er his­to­ri­ans will­ing to take on con­tem­po­rary his­to­ry and her obser­va­tions can be quite insight­ful. I hope she’ll find an even wider audi­ence with this site and the blog that she plans to add soon.

Why would a Quaker do a crazy thing like that?

June 10, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Look­ing back at Friends’ respons­es to the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er hostages

When four Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers were tak­en hostage in Iraq late last Novem­ber, a lot of Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions stum­bled in their response. With Tom Fox we were con­front­ed by a full-on lib­er­al Quak­er Chris­t­ian wit­ness against war, yet who stepped up to explain this modern-day prophet­ic wit­ness? AFSC? FCNL? FGC? Nope, nope and nope. There were too many orga­ni­za­tions that couldn’t man­age any­thing beyond the boil­er­plate social jus­tice press release. I held my tongue while the hostages were still in cap­tiv­i­ty but through­out the ordeal I was mad at the exposed frac­ture lines between reli­gious wit­ness and social activism.

When­ev­er a sit­u­a­tion involv­ing inter­na­tion­al issues of peace and wit­ness hap­pens, the Quak­er insti­tu­tions I’m clos­est to auto­mat­i­cal­ly defer to the more polit­i­cal Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions: for exam­ple, the head of Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence told staff to direct out­siders inquir­ing about Tom Fox to AFSC even though Fox had been an active leader of FGC-sponsored events and was well known as a com­mit­ted vol­un­teer. The Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee and Friends Com­mit­tee on Nation­al Leg­is­la­tion have knowl­edge­able and com­mit­ted staff, but their insti­tu­tion­al cul­ture does­n’t allow them to talk Quak­erism except to say we’re a nice bunch of social-justice-loving peo­ple. I appre­ci­ate that these orga­ni­za­tions have a strong, vital iden­ti­ty, and I accept that with­in those con­fines they do impor­tant work and employ many faith­ful Friends. It’s just that they lack the lan­guage to explain why a gro­cery store employ­ee with a love of youth reli­gious edu­ca­tion would go unarmed to Badg­dad in the name of Chris­t­ian witness.

The wider blo­gos­phere was total­ly abuzz with news of Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er Team hostages (Google blogsearch lists over 6000 posts on the top­ic). There were hun­dreds of posts and com­ments, includ­ing long dis­cus­sions on the biggest (and most right-leaning) sites. Almost every­one won­dered why the CPT work­ers were there, and while the opin­ions weren’t always friend­ly (the hostages were often paint­ed as naive ide­al­ists or disin­gen­u­ous ter­ror­ist sym­pa­thiz­ers), even the doubters were moti­vat­ed by a pro­found curios­i­ty and desire to understand.

The CPT hostages were the talk of the blo­gos­phere, yet where could we find a Quak­er response and expla­na­tion? The AFSC respond­ed by pub­li­ciz­ing the state­ments of mod­er­ate Mus­lim lead­ers (call­ing for the hostages’ release; I emailed back a sug­ges­tion about list­ing Quak­er respons­es but nev­er got a reply). Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing put togeth­er a nice enough what-you-can-do page that was tar­get­ed toward Friends. The CPT site was full of infor­ma­tion of course, and there were plen­ty of sto­ries on the lefty-leaning sites like elec​tron​i​ci​raq​.net and the UK site Ekkle­sia. But Friends explain­ing this to the world?

The Quak­er blog­gers did their part. On Decem­ber 2 I quick­ly re-jiggered the tech­nol­o­gy behind Quak​erQuak​er​.org to pro­vide a Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er watch on both Non​vi​o​lence​.org and Quak­erQuak­er (same list­ings, mere­ly rebrand­ed for slightly-separate audi­ences, announced on the post It’s Wit­ness Time). These pages got lots of views over the course of the hostage sit­u­a­tion and includ­ed many posts from the Quak­er blog­ger com­mu­ni­ty that had recent­ly congealed.

But here’s the inter­est­ing part: I was able to do this only because there was an active Quak­er blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty. We already had gath­ered togeth­er as a group of Friends who were will­ing to write about spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and wit­ness. Our con­ver­sa­tions had been small and inti­mate but now we were ready to speak to the world. I some­times get paint­ed as some sort of fun­da­men­tal­ist Quak­er, but the truth is that I’ve want­ed to build a com­mu­ni­ty that would wres­tle with these issues, fig­ur­ing the wrestling was more impor­tant than the lan­guage of the answers. I had already thought about how to encour­age blog­gers and knit a blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty togeth­er and was able to use these tech­niques to quick­ly build a Quak­er CPT response.

Two oth­er Quak­ers who went out of their way to explain the sto­ry of Tom Fox: his per­son­al friends John Stephens and Chuck Fager. Their Freethe​cap​tives​now​.org site was put togeth­er impres­sive­ly fast and con­tained a lot of good links to news, resources and com­men­tary. But like me, they were over-worked blog­gers doing this in their non-existant spare time (Chuck is direc­tor of Quak­er House but he nev­er said this was part of the work).

After an ini­tial few qui­et days, Tom’s meet­ing Lan­g­ley Hill put togeth­er a great web­site of links and news. That makes it the only offi­cial Quak­er orga­ni­za­tion that pulled togeth­er a sus­tained cam­paign to sup­port Tom Fox.

Lessons?

So what’s up with all this? Should we be hap­py that all this good work hap­pened by vol­un­teers? Johan Mau­r­er has a very inter­est­ing post, “Are Quak­ers Mar­gin­al?” that points to my ear­li­er com­ment on the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers and doubts whether our avoid­ance of “hireling priests” has giv­en us a more effec­tive voice. Let’s remem­ber that insti­tu­tion­al Quak­erism began as sup­port of mem­bers in jail for their reli­gious wit­ness; among our ear­li­est com­mit­tee gath­er­ings were meet­ings for suf­fer­ings — busi­ness meet­ings focused on pub­li­ciz­ing the plight of the jailed and sup­port the fam­i­ly and meet­ings left behind.

I nev­er met Tom Fox but it’s clear to me that he was an excep­tion­al Friend. He was able to bridge the all-too-common divide between Quak­er faith and social action. Tom was a heal­er, a wit­ness not just to Iraqis but to Friends. But I won­der if it was this very whole­ness that made his work hard to cat­e­go­rize and sup­port. Did he sim­ply fall through the insti­tu­tion­al cracks? When you play base­ball on a dis­or­ga­nized team you miss a lot of easy catch­es sim­ply because all the out­field­ers think the next guy is going to go for the ball. Is that what hap­pened? And is this what would hap­pen again?

Must read: G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide

March 21, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Read
a fab­u­lous arti­cle last night and this morn­ing by Diana Boyd, a PhD
stu­dent at UC-Berkeley and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley.
She’s writ­ing about the inter­ac­tions of cul­ture and tech­nol­o­gy and it
speaks a lot to some of the online and offline con­ver­sa­tions I’ve been
hav­ing lately.

Here’s the link: G/localization: When Glob­al Infor­ma­tion and Local Inter­ac­tion Col­lide. And here are some snip­pets to entice you to fol­low it:

On cul­ture:

When mass media began, peo­ple assumed that we would all
con­verge upon one glob­al cul­ture. While the media has had an effect,
com­plete homog­e­niza­tion has not occurred. And it will not. While some
val­ues spread and are adopt­ed en-masse, cul­tures form with­in the mass
cul­ture to dif­fer­en­ti­ate small­er groups of peo­ple. Style-driven
sub­cul­tures are the most vis­i­ble form of this, but it occurs in
com­pa­nies and in oth­er social gatherings.

Techies will like her take on “embed­ded observers”: 

While the cre­ators have visions of what they think would
be cool, they do not con­struct unmov­able roadmaps well into the future.
They are con­stant­ly react­ing to what’s going on, adding new fea­tures as
need­ed. The code on these sites changes con­stant­ly, not just once a
quar­ter. The design­ers try out fea­tures and watch how they get used. If
no one is inter­est­ed, that’s fine — they’ll just make some­thing new.
They are all deeply in touch with what peo­ple are actu­al­ly doing, why
and how it man­i­fests itself on the site.

On online communities:

Dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ty par­tic­i­pants some­times find that they
“acci­den­tal­ly” meet some­one. Peo­ple col­lide on Flickr because they took
sim­i­lar pho­tos; the find won­der­ful blogs through search. These ad-hoc
inter­ac­tions typ­i­cal­ly occur because peo­ple are pro­duc­ing mate­r­i­al that
can be stum­bled across, either through search or brows­ing. They may not
intend for the mate­r­i­al to be con­sumed beyond the intend­ed audience,
but they also don’t see a rea­son to pre­vent it. In essence, they are
invit­ing moments of syn­chronic­i­ty. And syn­chronic­i­ty is energizing.

Of Theo, threats and selective press quoting

November 8, 2004
· Martin Kelley

The Baby Theo blog got a men­tion in today’s Philadel­phia Inquir­er, It’s almost as good as being there, by Kathy Boc­cel­la. They missed out on a huge rat­ings bonan­za by not pick­ing Theo for their pic­tures. Stranger was that two inter­views pro­duced only one off-topic sub­stan­tive line: “Mar­tin Kel­ly [sic] expe­ri­enced the worst of it when some­one threat­ened his infant son on his Baby Theo Web page [via Archive​.org, as it appeared around the time this arti­cle was written].

Above: Theo on learn­ing he was­n’t going to be the fea­tured baby pho­to in the Inquir­er piece… Real pho­to cap­tion: This week­end Julie Theo and I took a mini vaca­tion to the Penn­syl­va­nia coal regions. One of the stops was the beau­ti­ful­ly restored Tamaqua train sta­tion, where Theo’s great great grand­fa­ther, the first Mar­tin John Kel­ley, worked as a Read­ing Rail­road con­duc­tor. We woke the lit­tle guy up from a car nap to see the sta­tion and snap this pic­ture, cru­el par­ents that we are.

The Baby Theo site has been a lot of fun and it’s had great com­ments and emails of sup­port. It’s real­ly a shame that the arti­cle only used it to strike that tired old refrain about the pos­si­ble dan­ger lurk­ing on the internet.

The threat had noth­ing to do with Theo or with the baby blog. I’ve run a promi­nent anti­war web­site (closed, was at non​vi​o​lence​.org) through two wars now, and in the nine years of its exis­tence I’ve amassed quite a col­lec­tion of abu­sive emails. I try not to take them too seri­ous­ly: most come from sol­diers or from the fam­i­lies of solid­ers, peo­ple desparate­ly afraid of the future and sure­ly torn by the acts they’re being asked to com­mit. The inter­net pro­vides the psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tance for oth­er­wise good peo­ple to demo­nize the “com­mie Saddam-loving peacenik cow­ard.” You could get mad at a Pres­i­dent that active­ly mis­leads the coun­try into war but it’s eas­i­er to turn your anger on some schmuck who runs an anti­war web­site in his spare time. Send­ing threat­en­ing emails is itself cow­ard­ly and anti-democratic, of course, and as I’ve writ­ten on Non​vi​o​lence​.org, it’s ter­ri­bly inap­pro­pri­ate for “mil­i­tary per­son­nel to use gov­ern­ment com­put­ers to threat­en the free speech” of a dis­sent­ing Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. But it hap­pens. And because it hap­pens and because South Jer­sey has its share of pro-war hot­heads, you won’t see our spe­cif­ic town men­tioned any­where on the site. When I asked the Inquir­er reporter if they could not men­tion our town, she asked why, which led to the threat­en­ing emails, which led to the ques­tion whether Theo specif­i­cal­ly had been threatened.

And yes, there was a retired Lieu­tenant Colonel who sent a par­tic­u­lar­ly creepy set of emails (more on him below). The first email did­n’t men­tion Theo. It was just one of those every­day emails wish­ing that my fam­i­ly would be gang-raped, tor­tured and exe­cut­ed in front of me. I usu­al­ly ignore these but respond­ed to him, upon which I received a sec­ond email explain­ing that he was mak­ing a point with his threat (“You, your orga­ni­za­tion and oth­ers like you rep­re­sent the ‘flab­by soft white under­bel­ly’ of our Nation. This is the tis­sue of an ani­mal that is the tar­get of preda­tors.” Etc., etc., blah, blah, blah). This time he searched the Non​vi​o​lence​.org site more thor­ough­ly and specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned Theo in his what-if sce­nario. This was one email out of the thou­sands I receive every month. It was an inap­pro­pri­ate rhetor­i­cal argu­ment against a political/religious stance I’ve tak­en as a pub­lic wit­ness. It was not a cred­i­ble threat to my son.

Still, pre­cau­tion is in order. I men­tioned this sto­ry to the Inquir­er reporter only to explain why I did­n’t want the town list­ed. When I talked about the blog, I talked about old friends and dis­tant rel­a­tives keep­ing up with us and shar­ing our joys via the web­site. I talked about how the act of putting togeth­er entries helped Julie & I see Theo’s changes. I told Kathy how it was fun that friends who we had met via the inter­net were able to see some­thing beyond the Quak­er essays or polit­i­cal essays. None of that made it through to the arti­cle, which is a shame. A request to not pub­lish our home town became a sen­sa­tion­al­ist cau­tion­ary tale that is now being repeat­ed as a rea­son not to blog. How stupid.

The cau­tion­ary les­son is only applic­a­ble for those who both run a baby blog and a heav­i­ly used polit­i­cal web­site. When your web­site tops 50,000 vis­i­tors a day, you might want to switch to a P.O. Box. End of lesson.

For­tu­nate­ly with the inter­net we don’t have to rely on the fil­ter of a main­stream press reporters. Vis­i­tors from the Inquir­er arti­cle have been look­ing around the site and pre­sum­ably see­ing it’s not all about inter­net dan­gers. Since the Inquir­er arti­cle went up I’ve had twice as many vis­its from Google as I have from Philly​.com. Viva the web!

More:
For those inter­est­ed, the freaky retired Lieu­tenant Colonel is the chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of a pri­vate avi­a­tion com­pa­ny based in Flori­da, with con­tracts in three African nations that just hap­pen to be of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to the U.S. State Depart­ment. Although the com­pa­ny is named after him, his full name has been care­ful­ly excised from his web­site. I don’t sus­pect that he real­ly is retired from U.S.-sponsored mil­i­tary ser­vice, if you know what I mean… Here’s your tax dol­lars at work.

A few news­pa­per web­sites have repub­lished up the Inky arti­cle and two blog­ging news sites have picked up on it:

  • Yet Anoth­er Baby Blog­ging sto­ry uncov­ers dan­ger — but it’s not true ran in Blog​ging​Ba​by​.com: “When some­one threat­ened his son on his Baby Theo Web page, he took the site down; but left up a pic on his home page. Well, that is, accord­ing to the arti­cle, which some­how man­aged to not check its facts (maybe, ummm – go to the link you includ­ed in your arti­cle?) and dis­cov­er that, in fact, Baby Theo’s page is alive and well. We’re glad, Theo’s a cutie.”
  • Baby blog­gers ran in Net­fam­i­lynews. “The $64,000 question(s) is: Is this a shift of think­ing and behav­ior or, basi­cal­ly, a mis­take?.. Mar­tin Kel­ly, whose baby was threat­ened by some­one who vis­it­ed his baby page, would lean toward the mis­take side of the ques­tion.” (No I would­n’t, as I explained to the web­mas­ter later)

Quaker publications meeting (QUIP) in Indiana

April 28, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions, bet­ter known as “QUIP,” is a col­lec­tion of 50 Quak­er pub­lish­ers, book­sellers and authors com­mit­ted to the “min­istry of the writ­ten word.” I often think of QUIP as a sup­port group of sorts for those of us who real­ly believe that pub­lish­ing can make a dif­fer­ence. It’s also one of those places where dif­fer­ent branch­es of Friends come togeth­er to work and tell sto­ries. QUIP ses­sions strike a nice bal­ance between work and unstruc­tured time. It has its own nice cul­ture of friend­li­ness and coop­er­a­tion that are the real rea­son many of us go every year.

Quakers Uniting in Publications annual meeting in Richmond Indiana 2004.
Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions annu­al meet­ing in Rich­mond Indi­ana 2004.

The theme of the 2004 annu­al ses­sion was “New Ways to Reach Our Mar­kets in a Chang­ing World” and our guest pre­sen­ters were pub­li­cists Doug and Kate Ban­dos of KSB Pro­mo­tions: http://​www​.ksbpro​mo​tions​.com
The Evans House, built 1855: Gur­neyite high style back in the day… It’s now the home of the Quak­er Hill Con­fer­ence Cen­ter, where we met. The Gur­neyites evolved into Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing and I had some good con­ver­sa­tions with Friends about some of the vision­ing FUM is doing. Pret­ty inter­est­ing stuff, like many Friends they too are try­ing to fig­ure out how to wres­tle more ful­ly with Quak­er tradition. 
Our hosts were the staff of “Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing. The FUM cam­pus in Rich­mond, Indi­ana, is very pret­ty in April, with flow­ers and the crabap­ple trees 
Even pret­tier is the refor­ested trail down to the White­wa­ter Riv­er Falls. 
We wouldn’t be Quak­ers if we didn’t have lots of meet­ings. Left: QUIP clerks Lucy Dun­can, Bar­bara Mays, Eliz­a­beth Cave. 
Philip Arnold from the Quak­er Book­shop in Lon­don, Ann Rap­er of North Car­olina YM (FUM) pub­li­ca­tions com­mit­tee and Liz Yeats, a for­mer FGC employ­ee and long­time QUIP stal­wart (Ann and Liz are also both board mem­bers of “Friends Journal). 
QUIP meet­ings are real­ly all about the con­ver­sa­tions in between ses­sions. Bar­bara Mays of Friends Unit­ed Press talks with the new FUM web­mas­ter Cur­tis Her­mann (who lat­er showed me the secret FUM cof­fee sup­ply and chat­ted about col­lar­less shirt vendors). 
Mar­jorie Ewbank holds up QUIP’s “Quak­er Tapestry”:http://www.Quaker-tapestry.co.uk pan­el, which should be fin­ished by the end of the century. 
Oblig­a­tory pic­ture of Simon, some­times referred to as the “QUIP baby“since his par­ents met at an annu­al QUIP meeting. 
A field trip to the Levi Cof­fin house in Foun­tain City. Run entire­ly by very ded­i­cat­ed vol­un­teers, it’s the only home still stand­ing of Levi and Catharine Cof­fin, Friends who helped thou­sands of escaped slaves get to Cana­da through the Under­ground Railroad. 
How many cam­eras does it take to make a group shot? That’s Trish Carn (the UK’s Quak­er Month­ly), Antho­ny Manousos (West­ern US’s Friends Bul­letin) and our very gra­cious photo-taker (who I think might be Ann’s son?). 
The many faces of Sal­ly Rick­er­man, Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing char­ac­ter par excel­lence. Sal­ly spent part of the week­end chal­leng­ing me about my plain dress­ing — okay, polite­ly ask­ing me a ques­tion and then fol­low­ing up my answer with her opin­ions. Sal­ly also brought along a par­o­dy she once put togeth­er, a fly­er for an orga­ni­za­tion called some­thing like “The Soci­ety of Sen­ti­men­tal Friends” for all those who want to be Quak­er because their great great grand­par­ents were Quak­er and they like antiques like old musty meetinghouses. 
The many faces of Sal­ly Rick­er­man (2)
The many faces of Sal­ly Rick­er­man (3)
Bar­bara Hir­shkowitz in front of the falls. I think Friends Gen­eral Con­fer­ence should put in a nature trail near our office too (I vote for bull­doz­ing the “Nation­al Con­sti­tu­tion Center”).