I don’t think Quakers’ historical memory always serves us very well. In 1656, George Fox wrote a letter from Launceston Gaol, a portion of which is quoted in every edition of Faith and Practice. It’s been reproduced as giant posters and the key phrase has become one of the go-to elevator pitches for modern Friends. It tells us to “be patterns” and “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them ye may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you: then to the Lord God you shall be a sweet savour, and a blessing.”

We’ve taken one paragraph from one letter as a mission statement and now we get people wringing their hands trying to reconcile this Pollyanna-style niceness with the horror we see in the world. You get Friends valiantly trying (and mostly failing) to see “that of God” in ICE agents, terrorists, or authoritarian political leaders.

I think a big part of the problem is that Quakers have overall been a comfortable, well-off people for a long time. We’ve spent much of the last 300 years mostly remembering the happy-feeling stuff. Fox and his fellow early Friends were wary of “the world,” seeing it as a fallen place that we could transcend only with the guidance and healing powers of the Living Christ. Yes, he talked about being patterns in that letter, but way down. The letter actually started off in a thunderous manner that quite frankly, I think perhaps speaks more clearly to our time:

Dwell in the power of life and wisdom, and dread of the Lord of life, and of heaven and earth, that you may be preserved in the wisdom of God over all, and be a terror and a dread to all the adversaries of God, answering that of God in them all, spreading the truth abroad, awakening the witness, confounding the deceit, gathering up out of transgression into the life, into the covenant of light and peace with God. Let all nations hear the sound by word or by writing. Spare no place, spare no tongue, nor pen; but be obedient to the Lord God. Go through the work, and be valiant for the truth upon earth; tread and trample down all that is contrary.

None of this is practical advice for what to do if you see secret police jump out of unmarked van to kidnap someone off the street. But what if our editions of Faith and Practice all advised us to a terror and dread and to walk the earth treading and trampling on all that is contrary to divine love? Toward the end of the letter, Fox advised us to “be obedient to the power, for that will save you out of the hands of unreasonable men and preserve you over the world to himself.” May it be so.

Other commentaries: Simon St. Laurent (2007), Stuart Masters (2016), Mark Wutka (2018) and Lewis Benson’s brilliant 1970 essay “ ‘That of God’: What Did George Fox Mean by It?” Also, John Andrew Gallery has a recent Pendle Hill pamphlet on the essay, which I haven’t read but assume is worth reading.

Update: in the Reddit discussion KeithB said that he wondered if there were Quakers out there looking for justification to tangle it up with ICE officers. Pretty much as we were talking, word came out that the son of well-known Philly-area Quaker family being arrested at his home in Portland, Oregon, on suspicions of participating in violent anti-ICE protests a few weeks ago.

The prosecutors have released a bunch of pictures of violent activity being perpetrated by someone who looks like the accused, with a similar arm tattoo. That protestor used a stop sign as a battering ram, and then threw a brick at an ICE agent that hit his head, drew blood, and required medical attention. I sure hope it’s not a Quaker in those photos and that his defense attorneys can prove it. Tread and trampling is not a license for assault.

Hostels are great. I haven’t stayed in a hostel in forever but at $35/night, the price was right. I’m so glad I did. Every night was a new cast of people to get to meet, quirky and fun and delightfully weird. This was the weekend of the Flip-Flop Kickoff festival put on by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. As I understand it, the “flip flop” is an alternate way of doing a through-hike on the Appalachian Trail (“the AT”). Instead of starting in Georgia and heading north along with hundreds of others, you start in Harper’s Ferry (the honorary halfway point) and go south, then find a ride back to Harper’s Ferry and go north. The festival brought a lot of hikers to Cross Trails hostel, where I stayed, and I even participated in a few events; I felt myself an honorary AT hiker!

I love my bike. I put my bike rack on my old econobox car and used it every day to commute the five miles or so from the hostel to Harper’s Ferry. The C&O Canal Towpath is a mostly flat, beautiful trail that winds 180 miles alongside the Potomac River. One day I continued north from Harper’s Ferry and rode it to Shepardstown: a beautiful ride apart from the calf-breaking bluffs on either side of the trip.¹ Also a lot of outdoor fun is whitewater rafting. There’s three companies in the area offering it and I had a good time with Harper’s Ferry Adventure Center.

Don’t forget the non-vegan restaurants. I was excited by a vegan option in Harper’s Ferry but my favorite meal by far was at a regular cafe in Shepherdstown. I had an amazing homemade black bean veggie burger, a sesame noodles appetizer, decent fries, and a tall cold glass of hard apple cider. Five stars to the Blue Moon Cafe. Extra bonus: there’s an actual creek flowing through the back patio.

There is so much history atop itself in Harper’s Ferry. It’s a tiny town and yet every time you turn around there’s something monumental going on. John’s Brown raid is perhaps the most famous but it was also the site of multiple Civil War engagements, a provisioning stop for Meriwether Lewis, and a place where Thomas Jefferson waxed poetic.

Don’t defend Harper’s Ferry. There’s much one could say about John Brown’s motivations, tactics, etc., but really dude, how dumb do you have to be to try to force-start the Civil War there of all places? As soon as word got out about what was happening, militias from three states and federal troops poured in from the hills on all sides of the town and trapped him. It was over almost as soon as it began. The Civil War engagements were like that too. It’s a fishbowl with mountain ridges on all sides: you just set up your munitions on Maryland or Loudoun Heights and lob cannon balls down on the town until you get a surrender. A quote attributed to a Union lieutenant in an exhibit really summed it up for me: “Gen. Jackson and Gen. Hill told me personally, they had rather take it [Harper’s Ferry] forty times than to undertake to defend it once.”

Visiting new meetings is great. On Sunday morning I had church time so I motored south to visit Goose Creek Meeting in Lincoln, Virginia. ² It’s an old meeting, steeped in its own history. It’s aways fun to see a new meeting. They have honest-to-God pews with hymnal racks along the back, each carefully stocked with a Bible, an FGC hymnal, and Baltimore’s Faith and Practice. They have a loud clock, which I’ve always heard was a Hicksite marker and indeed I later learned the Hicksites held the meetinghouse in the nineteenth century schisms.³ There were only two messages and one was a fake Gandhi quote (you all will be happy that I didn’t fact-check it in real time and just let the sentiment behind it stand for itself). It seemed like a really grounded meeting. I was impressed that people got there early and sat quietly preparing for worship. Everyone was very friendly for the few minutes of coffee hour I could squeeze out before heading back north to pick up scouts.

And a big thanks to Troop 48 Berlin NJ for getting me out of the house. Scoutmaster Mike has a post about their trip up on the website. It’s a great troop and Gregory’s really thriving there.

An under-45 communications strategy, in contrast, would mostly involve social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, possibly Tumblr or Pinterest). Articles would be short and would contain mostly content directly relevant to the reader—or, if the content were not directly relevant, it would be single-story narratives with an emphasis on personal impact. Announcements would come out through messenger apps or text messages, with a strong element of user control about which announcements to receive and which not. Photos and videos would be used frequently.

I’m always a bit wary of generational determinism. I think generational ideas are more like underlying trends that get more or less traction over time. And Quaker digital outreach in particular has been a thing for a quarter century now. But the underlying message—that some people need to be reached digitally while others are still best served by print—is a sound one and I’m glad Emily’s bringing it up.

But it’s still kind of sad that we still need to make this kind of argument. I remember having these discussions around an FGC outreach committee table fifteen years ago: surely we’re all on board about the need for digital outreach in 2018?

The 45-Yard Line

Technical note: this was only possible with a water resistant phone, as I would not have dared wade out into a pool with previous phones. The 3D bokeh effect is courtesy of the iPhone 7 Plus “Portrait” mode. It’s not perfect: zoom in and there’s some distortion around his left arm, both at the top where it fuzzes around the mid background of the slide and on bottom where there are artifacts in the contrast with the far background of the fence line. But I’m still pleased and amazed at how well the 3D imaging works.

Just before a 2013 trip, I wrote “Nostalgia Comes Early,” a post about memories and why I go to the trouble to share these posts—as much with my future self as with readers (I continued this thought later with Recovering the Past Through Photos).

Every successive family trip creates a magnitude more data than the one preceding it. I have exactly 10 photos from the first time I visited Walt Disney World, with my then-fiancée in 2001. I have only fuzzy memories of the trip. A year or so later I returned back to Florida (Key West this time) for a honeymoon with her, a trip that has zero photos. I remember maybe a half dozen things we did but few locales visited.

Contrast this with a 2013 Disney World trip, for which we made a whole blog, A Special WDW Family. The focus was traveling Disney with autistic kids. There’s a lot of information in there. We wrote about meals and rides, small victories, and child meltdowns. The bandwidth of memories isn’t just in the number of jpeg files but in the distinct memories I have of the events of that week-plus.

We took many hundreds of photos over our most recent family vacation in December 2015, only a small fraction of which went online. In addition, I have Google Location data for the trip and Foursquare checkins logged in Evernote. I know how many steps I took each day. I know whether I had a good sleep. We didn’t make a public blog but we have a long annotate log of each restaurant and stop, with annotation tips to remind our future selves about how we could do things better in the future. The metadata is in itself not so important, but it’s useful to be able to drop into a day and remember what we did and see the smiles (and tiredness) on faces each day.

Google’s approach cleverly stitches together multiple photos. It uses a process much like their 360-degree photo app: you start with a overview photo. Once taken, you see four circles hovering to the sides of the picture. Move the camera to each and it takes more pictures. Once you’ve gone over all four circles, Google stitches these five photos together in such a way that there’s no perspective distortion.

What’s remarkable is the speed. I scanned 15 photos in while also making dinner for the kids. The dimensions of all looked good and the resolution looks about as good as the original. These are good results for something so easy.

Check out Google’s announcement blog post for details.