I collect style guides and the only modern one I’ve found to address it is an early-aughts version from Friends General Conference, originally written in the late 90s by Barbara Hirshkowitz. Barbara more or less taught me everything I know about editing when we worked together at New Society Publishers in the early 90s. Bits of her personality come out in the guide so it’s fun to read it and remember her and later additions by Chel Avery are just as wonderful. I miss them both, both as editors and friends¹

Early Friends were well known for their idiosyncrasies. They weren’t afraid of looking weird for a principle they believed in. They would risk imprisonment, illness, and death for these principles. For example, their radical belief in the equality of all people under Christ ² led them to refuse to take off their hats in front of judges. Friends were hauled off to jail just for refusing this hat honor. Plain language, dress, and dates all set off Friends as a “peculiar people” who were easily recognizable for standing out. But this wasn’t necessarily a bad weirdness: it also reinforced their commitment to a radical integrity.

Succeeding generations of Friends chipped away and eventually dropped many of these peculiarities. Much of this was peer pressure I suspect: being strange got in the way of assimilating into the wider culture. Another motivation, especially among more evangelically minded Friends, was outreach. If we want to bring in the masses we should drop the silly, outdated markers that are secondary to the core message—that Christ has come to teach the people himself.

Another reason for the decline is ossification. It’s perhaps inevitable that every religious tradition will gradually forget why they do the things they do and start doing them simply because that is something they’ve always. Kids in Quaker First-day school will be told we don’t swear oaths or don’t gamble or vote in our internal decision-making because Friends don’t engage in those activities. Forgotten in this are the biblical and historical theological rationales for avoiding the practices. Margaret Fell described this process when she recounted the first time hearing George Fox preach: “We are all thieves; we have taken the Scripture in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves.” I think many Friends have taken our traditions mostly in words. It’s easy to abandon a practice you don’t understand.

So I thought I’d share my own personal test for deciding whether an old Quaker peculiarity is worth reviving. I’ve probably shared this before (the danger when someone with maybe twelve interesting ideas has a twenty-plus year old blog³). Here they are:

Can a peculiarity be explained to an outsider in a few sentences without the need to give any historical context?

Is it a practice that one could argue is applicable to any Christian?

I realize the Bible is a contest realm but could someone understand it from a straight-forward reading of the gospels in particular and maybe even more particularly the Sermon on the Mount , from which so many Quaker testimonies arise. One of my favorite Quaker interpreters is the Anglican antislavery activist Thomas Clarkson. He described Quaker practice for the education of his denomination—I think he thought some of the ideas were worth poaching. Is an old Quaker practice found in the gospels and could someone like Clarkson want to import it into their Christian tradition?

What babies in the bathwater are worth preserving with this test? Are there tests you use to think about Quaker practices?

What do Quakers believe? How do we practice our faith? The best place to look for the answers might be in a book of faith and practice. Here’s what they are and how they evolved over time.

http://quakerspeak.com/what-is-a-quaker-book-of-faith-and-practice/

How many skeletons might remain buried? Possibly thousands, according to archaeologists, but no one knows. Historical maps are unclear on the cemeteries’ boundaries, but numerous histories portray the grounds as used first by Quakers and then by the poor, whose numbers increased along with the size of the city.

They quote the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting general secretary, who had heard nothing about this. The article also cites a 1880s article in Friends Intelligencer, the predecessor to Friends Journal.

https://www.philly.com/arts/schuylkill-yards-quaker-cemeteries-philadelphia-history-brandywine-drexel-20190502.html

It has been the task of the whole meeting not just of one or two; there has been an awareness that what they are doing now will need to change and evolve. And there has been a care and nourishing of us as parents too, with our own spiritual journeys and need for nurture.

I know, from talking to other Quaker parents – and, very sadly, from parents who would love to explore Quakerism but who have felt discouraged or unwelcomed – that we have been particularly lucky. Lucky not because we found a Quaker community with a ready-made children’s meeting, but because we found a meeting willing and ready to welcome, to make space, where there was a sense of gladness that we were there.

Welcoming families in meetings

How do we rejoice in the presence of children in our meetings and nurture their spiritual growth? Alistair…

Quakers

I am going to make a bold apology for a clarified liberal Quaker identity that retains its roots and recovers worship in the spirit of Christ, but yet releases us from the orthodox Christian preoccupations that no longer speak to so many unprogrammed Friends.

Are Quakers Christian?

Centering is always a welcome challenge, for, as one would expect, prison can be a noisy place and competing conversations can be overwhelming. What I do is draw myself into the pictures and focus upon the images and people therein. I have accompanying pictures of places visited by Friends and sent to me over the years with scenery that, for me as a person raised on the concrete pavements of New York City, gives me visions of natural beauty without the clutter of building structures and the like.

Never Having Set Foot in the Meetinghouse

When the meetinghouse is on the other side of state prison walls.

Friends Journal

As far as I know, the final settlement in that case was never made public. In a larger sense, the “final settlement” demanded by God’s grace and justice will never be measured in dollars, but there is something satisfying about knowing that money was involved: almost nothing slices through pious misdirection or sophistry like cold cash. But it’s also true that cash doesn’t cut deeply enough.

I’m still unconvinced we’re all doing enough to bring daylight to skeletons in our closets or healing to victims. Lawsuits make everyone clam up, yet they too often seem to be the only mechanism for shedding light on the situation in the first place.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2019/02/trustworthy-part-one-cost-of-betrayal.html

Despite the risks, Rustin felt it was his responsibility to be open about his sexuality. He traces that duty back to an experience he had as a black man in the 1940s Jim Crow South, when he took his place at the back of a segregated bus.

“As I was going by the second seat to go to the rear, a white child reached out for the ring necktie I was wearing and pulled it,” he recalled in the newly released audio. “Whereupon its mother said, ‘Don’t touch a n*****.’ ”

As Rustin tells it, here’s what ran through his mind in that moment after the white woman called him the slur: “If I go and sit quietly at the back of that bus now, that child, who was so innocent of race relations that it was going to play with me, will have seen so many blacks go in the back and sit down quietly that it’s going to end up saying, ‘They like it back there, I’ve never seen anybody protest against it.’ ”

Rustin was fired from his work with organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and he often had to work semi-anonymously behind the scenes. The famous March on Washington that we remember for Martin Luther King Jr.‘s speech was Rustin’s idea.

One of his catch-phrases in speeches was that we should “speak truth to power.” When he worked with the American Friends Service Committee to write the famous 1955 pamphlet of that name, not only wasn’t he not listed as one of the authors, but the others concocted some ridiculous story about the phrase being some ancient Quaker saying. Shameful. I really want to listen to his story and can’t wait for the podcast!

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/06/682598649/in-newly-found-audio-a-forgotten-civil-rights-leader-says-coming-out-was-an-abso?fbclid=IwAR3eUSvE9RsHVjgQU3zCmDs6z49bIuK3ijTt1JBznV7BVzpekH7G2kwCm2c