I was remiss in sharing the March Quakers Today podcast, which looked at Quakers, Birds, and Justice. Friends have long been especially interested in the natural world. One of the interviewees is Rebecca Heider, who wrote A Quaker Guide to Birdwatching in last month’s issue of FJ.

One of the things we’ve learned in the last couple of years is that it is easier to visit a new Quaker meeting that’s far away because of the opportunities set up through online worship, and we’ve seen a lot of people go back to visit a meeting they visited before or to be able to visit someplace they’ve always heard about but never been to, and that has been a gift to our community.

A Quaker’s Guide (PDF)

I have tended to describe this shift in understanding as the moment when Quakerism “clicked” for me—when it ceased to be just the weird subculture I grew up in, and more a matter of conviction. Practices that I ignored or never quite understood, like making group decisions without taking a vote, now made sense, because they were borne out of an attempt to make Christ the present teacher in all affairs.

Isaac’s piece stems in part from the December Friends Journal, on Quakers and Christianity. A large percentage of the submissions we received for the issue had remarkably similar personal stories: people had grown up in a restrictive religious tradition and come to Liberal Friends because of its openness to spiritual seeking. If anything they were hostile to Christianity and distinctive Quaker peculiarities when they joined but over time they slowly shifted, often after getting to know grounded elder Friends. Now they quietly identified as Christian Friends.

We could have printed a whole issue of (mostly) convinced Liberal Friends who had rediscovered Christianity. Instead we picked a representative sample for the print edition and published the rest as part of our our extended online edition; you can read it all at the online contents. Although Isaac’s story is different (he grew up as a Friend) it shares a similar trajectory.

(Issac also has some questions about Quaker publishing, with a link to a great 2009 blog post from Johan Maurer. I feel I should talk about this issue too but that’ll take a bit more pondering on my part).

Is Quaker Culture an Obstacle to Faith?

Various January server bills are coming due in the next week and the Paypal account is empty. Between domain registrations, server bills, and the Ning service the site can often rack up over $50 in a given month.

Please consider a one-time donation at http://paypal.me/martinkelley or use the QuakerQuaker donation page to set up a monthly donation.

In recent years, a number of Black Friends Journal contributors have shared heartbreaking stories of not feeling welcome in Quaker circles. As we planned this issue, we self‐consciously added a question mark to the end of its title—“A Racially Diverse Society of Friends?” The choice of punctuation hints at a certain weariness—are we really still asking this?—along with the suggestion that maybe many Friends are content enough with the status quo that they might simply answer “no” to a call for diversity.

Racially Diverse Society of Friends (January 2019) Archives — Friends Journal

January 2019: A Racially Diverse Society of Friends? Full Issue Access Features: Are We Ready to Make the…

Friends Journal