Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication.

I appreciate her comments on invested readers. The number of people who were part of the “Quaker blogosphere” back in day was not that large but something about the crucible of the writing and debating meant that they developed ideas that have outsized influence today. The same sorts of conversations continue to happen today in corners of Facebook, Reddit, and Discord but there’s not the same sort of feeling of shared community.

Requiem for Early Blogging

As part of Talking Points Memo’s 25th anniversary, I wrote an essay on early blogging, and what I…

Elizabeth Spiers

The most important thing to keep in mind about ChatGPT and AI, IMO, is that it’s from the past and about the past, all history and established patterns… Friends Journal is about the present and the future, especially those wonderful videos featuring real present-day Friends. The Now and Tomorrow need to be our focus.

Read her full response in the comment section.

It starts with the well-known story of nineteenth century Quaker prison reformers who with good intentions invented solitary confinement at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. It then goes on to talk about modern prison-reform advocates. It namechecks Michelle Alexander, talks about the U.S. Solitary Confinement Study and Reform Act of 2019 and similar legislation in states.

Almost two centuries after the Eastern State Penitentiary opened, Quakers and their organizations (e.g. local and regional Meetings, American Friends Service Committee, Friends Committee on National Legislation) are working to end the practice that we had a hand in creating. We urge you to join us!

Toward the end they quote a minute from the meeting. I’m sometimes a little weary of political minutes that never see the light of day outside of the business meeting but this article is a great example of integrating that into a strong article in a local news outlet. Kudos to the twelve Connecticuters (yes I had to look up that denonym).

Polls and analysts confirm a growing trend for people to tune in almost exclusively to those news sources which reinforce their own opinions and condemn the others — regardless of quality, the use of facts, opinion, bias, and misinformation. Experts call this “source bias.” My straight-talking Quaker mother referred to it as “people trying to sell you a pig in a poke” — people trying to convince you of a point of view by giving you limited or false information, trying to sell you a pig in a bag when you can’t see it or examine it. Communist countries and dictatorships are masters at this.

https://www.buckscountycouriertimes.com/news/20190203/faith-freedom-of-press-essential-to-democracy

She’s being given the award for her “fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars, and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community,” according to a statement from the prize board. Bell Burnell told the BBC she plans to give all of her prize money to women, ethnic minorities and refugee students aiming to become physics researchers. 

You can read more about Bell Burnell on her Quakers in the World page.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/07/jocelyn-bell-burnells-1967-nobel-pulsars-breakthrough-prize-science/1220936002/

Tip of the hat to Doug Bennett for the suggestion and links.

For many of us, our predicament today seems most like the soil with the thorns: We want to draw closer to God and walk in God’s ways, but there is so much bad news, so many obligations, so many distractions. We can be led astray, sometimes without even knowing it. The founder of our movement, George Fox, once said that “whatever ye are addicted to, the Tempter will come in that thing; and when he can trouble you, then he gets advantage over you, and then ye are gone.” We can be addicted to many things: not just, say, alcohol or gambling, but ideas, both about the world and about ourselves.

Alone, none of us can do much to change the world. But we can allow ourselves to be instruments of peace, reconciliation, love. It’s easy to get stuck and tempting in those times to get defensive or look toward others. I’ve found the old Quaker take on “The Tempter” to be personally very useful. I’ve learned to question and go inward whenever I feel too much pride in something or find myself part of a group that seems self-satisfied with its work.

Good soil

Who tells our story in this time?  In today’s world of immediate news, and social media, and everyone having a twitter account and an opinion – there’s a lot of misinformation out there.  Some of it might be damaging and outright manipulative.  Some of it might just be misinformed people, who are confusing Quakers (for example) with Amish folks, or Shakers.

One of the reasons I’ve been so involved in Quaker media is my longtime concern that we’re in increasing danger of being defined by outsiders. A mainstream site with a page on Quakers can easily show up higher in search results than pages we create.  For a long time back in the day, an entry on Quakers written by some Unitarians on Religioustolerance.com was a top hit. Google and Facebook have long had more say in defining Quaker beliefs than any of our national organizations. Even when real-life Quakers are involved— in Facebook groups, Wikipedia editing, blogging, and the original Quaker.org—there was none of the kind of formal Quaker process (for better and worse) that historically characterized Quaker publishing.

One happy irony is that Kathleen herself came in through a channel with no Quaker involvement. She writes: ” I had never heard of Quakers until I took an internet quiz in my mid- thirties.” This is almost certainly the “Belief-o-Matic” Beliefnet quiz (confirmed in comments). The site was founded as a venture-capital-fueled  attempt to win the advertising religion market in the heady years of what we retrospectively call the dot-com bubble. The original quiz dates further back to a still-going site called SelectSmart, which hosts dozens of quizzes (“Which Bond Villain Are You?,” “What Pizza Topping Are You?,” “Pink Floyd Album Selector”), one of the most popular of which is “Belief System Selector.” The site is Curt and Lori Anderson, a husband-and-wife team; he was the techie who programmed the quizzes; she hunted for content. She used online sources and her local library to coming up with questions for him to plug in for the belief quiz (read some of the story here and also here). Beliefnet started hosting it independently, giving it a UI refresh and renaming it Belief-o-Matic. For whatever reasons of wonky algorithms huge percentages of people who took the test came out as “Liberal Quaker” or “Orthodox Quaker.” No Friends were involved in the quiz, hence the archaic names (few Friends have identified as Orthodox for generations).

In the 2000s, this quiz was inadvertently far more successful in outreach than any program conceived by Friends (sorry PYM/FGC/Pendle Hill donors). I think we’ve all become better at media and telling our own story but Kathleen’s question—who tells our story in this time?—is still a key one. After all, Lori Anderson’s checklist of beliefs (on SelectSmart and Beliefnet) are probably one of the most-read definitions of Liberal Quakerism.

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Updated July 2018

As White searched for graveyard ledgers in the library — crammed with stuffed birds, clothing, shells and books — she came upon the skull. Her legs wobbled. And her stomach dropped. Arsenault-Cote offered advice and reassurance. “You’re out there looking for them, and now they’re showing themselves to you,” she told White. “He’s been waiting a long time.” Historically, Philadelphia Quakers were “inconsistent friends” to Indians, engaged in the same colonizing projects as other faiths while seeing themselves as uniquely able to educate natives.

Inconsistent is an apt word. Paula Palmer has been tracing the history of Quaker Indian Boarding Schools: high-minded enterprises that often forcably stripped heritage from their pupils in ways that were as culturally imperial as they were unaware.

Byberry Meeting dates to the 1690s and the meetinghouse grounds are full of abolitionist history. The skull was apparently dug up in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a nearby canal project and is thought to have come to the meetinghouse as part of a collection from a shuttered historical society. Its presence on the shelf represents the attitudes of Friends many decades ago who thought nothing of placing a Lenape skull in a case. There’s also the sad subtext that the meeting library is said to be so unused that most of the meeting’s contemporary members had no idea it was there. It’s a shame that it took an outside researcher to notice the skeletons in our display case.

https://www.philly.com/philly/news/483072571.html