Granted, as a deep student of Carl Gustav Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Yungblut’s definitions of those three adjectives may not have exactly been old-school. This particularly goes for his reflections on the word “evangelical.” But the dynamic conversation among these qualities — different definitions and all — may be vital if Friends are to grow in usefulness to the Body of Christ, and to those who’ve not yet been convinced.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/10/quakerism-of-future.html

Superposters tend to be “more opinionated, more extreme, more engaged, more everything,” said Andrew Guess, a Princeton University social scientist. When more casual users open Facebook, often what they see is a world shaped by superposters like Mr. Wasserman. Their exaggerated worldviews play well on the algorithm, allowing them to collectively — and often unknowingly — dominate newsfeeds. “That’s something special about Facebook,” Dr. Paluck said. “If you end up getting a lot of time on the feed, you are influential. It’s a difference with real life.”

A great many general-interest Facebook groups that I see are dominated by trollish people whose visibility relies on how provocative they can get without being banned. This is true in many Quaker-focused groups. Facebook prioritizes engagement and nothing seems to get our fingers madly tapping more than provocation by someone half-informed.

Formal membership in a Quaker meeting is a considered process; for many Quaker groups, public ministry is also a deliberated process, with clearness committees, anchor committees, etc. On Facebook, membership consists of clicking a like button; public ministry, aka visibility, is a matter of having a lot of time to post comments. Public groups with minimal moderation which run on Facebook’s engagement-inducing algorithms are the public face of Friends these days, far more visible than any publication or recognized Quaker body’s Facebook presence. I written before of my long-term worry that with the rise of social media gatekeeping sites, we’re not the ones writing our story anymore.

I don’t have any answers. But the NYTimes piece helped give me some useful ways of thinking about these phenomena.

Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests (Published 2018)

Towns where people use Facebook more also had more attacks on refugees, building on suspicions that the platform…

www.nytimes.com

Considering today’s emphasis on individuality, plurality, and personal psychology, I believe that returning to the metaphor of the Seed holds the most potential for fertile spiritual development and guidance in our own era.

I find the evolution of Quaker metaphors fascinating. Early Quaker sermons and epistles were packed with biblical allusions. I grew up relatively unchurched but I’ve tried to make up for it over the years. I’ve read the Bible cover-to-cover using the One Year Bible plan (like a lot of people I suspect, it took me a little over two years) and have been part of different denominational Bible study groups. I try to look up references. But even with that I don’t catch half the references early sermons packed in.

John Woolman lived a couple of generations after the first Friends. We Quaker remember his Journal for ministry of its anti-slavery sentiments, finally becoming a consensus among Friends by the time of its publication in 1774. But other religious folks have read it for its literary value. Open a random page and Woolman will have up to half a dozen metaphors for the Divine. It’s packed and rich and accessible. I find a kind of particular Quaker spiritual truth in Woolman’s rotation of metaphors: it implies that divinity is more than any specific words we try to stuff it into.

Lately Quaker metaphors have tended to become more sterile. I think we’re still worried about specifics but instead of expanding our language we contract it into a kind of impenetrable code. The “Light of Christ” becomes the “Inward Christ” then the “Inward Light” then “the Light” or “Spirit.” We’re still echoing the Light metaphors packed into the Book of John but doing so in such a way that seems particularly parochial to Friends and non-obvious to newcomers. A major New Testament theme is reduced to Quaker lingo.

Jnana Hodson’s problem with “the seed” as metaphor is interesting: “ ‘seed,’ as such, has far fewer Biblical citations than the corresponding complementary ‘light’ or ‘true’ and ‘truth’ do.” I’m not sure I ever noticed that. I like the seed, with its organic connotations and promise of future growth.  But apparently the few biblical allusions were rather sexist (spoiler: it often meant semen) and lacking in biological awareness. It feels like Friends are searching for neutral metaphors like “the seed” these days; we also have a lot of gatherings around “weaving.” I certainly don’t think we should be limited to first century images of divinity but I also don’t think we’ve quite figured out how we can talk about the guidance we receive from the Inward Teacher.

The Seed, initially, is the most problematic of the three central Quaker metaphors

I had hoped the idea of conscience would leap up to new writers, especially in our current political climate, and that the articles might serve as a bridge between 1960s Quaker activism and today. Sometimes our themes inspire writers and sometimes they don’t.

I’ve occasionally written Quakerranter blog posts about upcoming submission opportunities but I’d like to make it more official and post these every month from the Friends Journal website. We’re calling the feature “From the Editor’s Desk.”

I’d also like you all to share these with people you think should be writing for us, especially if they’re new writers coming from different perspectives. Diversities of all kind are always welcome.

I was a Quaker blogger (and thus writer) for many years and I worked for Friends Journal for part of that time but I only once sent in a submission before I became senior editor. Why? Was I waiting to be asked? Was I unsure what I might write about? Whatever the reason, we need to always be finding and encouraging new people. Some of the most interesting articles we’ve published started after one of our fans shared an upcoming issue topic with someone who was outside of our network. My goal with these posts is really to encourage you all to share these in emails and on your Facebook walls so we can keep expanding the Quaker writer universe.

Here’s the first one: a call for writers for the March 2018 issue on Quakers and the Holy Land.

Page not found — Friends Journal

Friends Journal

Footnote: Every once in a while we’ll get some article in and I’ll sigh because I can remember a previous article that covered the same ground. When I go to look it up I realize that the earlier article was published fifteen or more years ago. We have new readers every year and it’s okay to circle around to core themes every decade or so. We also need to remember the interesting people and incidents that happened long enough ago because our collective memory is always in the process of fading. I’m a peacenik longtime Quaker so I knew Dan Seeger was the named defendant in a major landmark Supreme Court decision in the 1960s, for example, but I don’t assume most Friends knew this. It’s still a cool story. It still inspires. It’s important to keep the story alive.

Capitalization has lots of built-in quirks. In general, we capitalize only when names come from proper nouns and don’t concern ourselves about mismatches. We can write about “frogs and salamanders and Fowler’s toads” or “diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s.” Religious terms are even trickier: there’s the Gospel of Luke that is part of the gospel of Christ. In my Quaker work, it’s surprising how often I have to go into a exegesis of intent over whether the writer is talking about a capital‑L divine Light or a more generic lower-case lightness of being. “Black” and “white” are both clearly lowercased when they refer to colors and most style guides have kept it that way for race.

But seriously? We’re talking about more than color when we use it as a racial designation. This is also identity. Does it really make sense to write about South Central L.A. and talk about its “Koreans, Latinos, and blacks?” The counter-argument says that if capitalize Black, what then with White? Consistency is good and they should presumably match, except for the reality check: Whiteness in America has historically been a catch-all for non-coloredness. Different groups are considered “White” in different circumstances; many of the most-proudly White ethnicities now were colored a century ago. Much of the swampier side of American politics has been reinforcing racial identity so that out-of-work Whites (codename: “working class”) will vote for the interests of White billionaires rather than out-of-work people of color (codename: “poor”) who share everything but their melatonin level. All identities are incomplete and surprisingly fluid when applied at the individual level, but few are as non-specific as “White” as a racial designation.

Back in the 1990s we could dodge the question a bit. The style guide for my current publication notes “lc, but substitute ‘African American’ in most contexts.” Many progressive style sheets back in the day gave similar advice. In the ebb and flow of preferred identity nomenclature, African American was trending as the more politically correct designation, helped along by a strong endorsement from Jesse Jackson. Black wasn’t quite following the way of Negro into obsolescence, but the availability of an clearly capitalized alternative gave white progressives an easy dodge. The terms also perhaps subtly distinguished between those good African Americans who worked within in the system from those dangerous radicals talking about Black Power and reparations.

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought Black back as the politically bolder word. Today it feels sharper and less coy than African American. It’s the better punch line for a thousand voices shouting rising up outside the governor’s mansion. We’ve arrived at the point where African American feels kind of stilted. It’s as if we’ve been trying a bit too hard to normalize centuries of slavery. We’ve got our Irish Americans with their green St Paddy’s day beer, the Italian Americans with their pasta and the African Americans with their music and… oh yes, that unfortunate slavery thing (wait for the comment: “oh wasn’t that terrible but you know there were Irish slaves too”). All of these identities scan the same in the big old melting pot of America. African American is fine for the broad sweep of history of a museum’s name but feels coldly inadequate when we’re watching a hashtag trend for yet another Black person shot on the street. When the megaphone crackles out “Whose lives matter?!?” the answer is “Black Lives Matter!” and you know everyone in the crowd is shouting the first word with a capital B.

Turning to Google: The Columbia Journalism Review has a nice piece on the nuances involved in capitalization, “Black and white: why capitalization matters.” This 2000 lecture abstract by Robert S. Wachal flat-out states that “the failure to capitalize Black when it is synonymous with African American is a matter of unintended racism,” deliciously adding “to put the best possible face on it.” In 2014, The NYTimes published Temple University prof Lori L. Tharps ’s convincing argument, “The Case for Black With a Capital B.” If you want to go historical, this thread on shifting terms by Ken Greeenwald on a 2004 Wordwizard forum [sadly gone and unfindable on Archive.org!] is pure gold.

And with that I’ll open up the comment thread.

Photo: A new publication of the Neo Post Convergent Diaper Set. An irony I have to point out is that I’ve agreed to have the boys raised Catholic, the faith to which Julie returned after eleven years with Friends. Can I help it if the kids look so dern photogenic in front of Quaker meetinghouses? Enlarged photo.

The Witness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings

By Martin Kelley

What is it like to be a thirty-something Friend these days? Lonely and frustrating. At least half of the committed, interesting and bold twenty-something Friends I knew ten years ago have left Quakerism. This isn’t normal youthful church-hopping and it’s not some character flaw of “Generation X.” They’ve left because they were simply tired of slamming their heads against the wall of an institutional Quakerism that neglected them and its own future.

I can certainly relate. For the last decade, I’ve done ground-breaking work publicizing nonviolence online. I’ve been profiled in the New York Times and invited on national talk radio shows, but the clerk of the peace committee in my achingly-small monthly meeting always forgets that I have “some website” and I’ve never been asked to speak to Friends about my work. I wouldn’t mind being overlooked if I saw others my age being recognized, but most of the amazing ministries I’ve known have been just as invisible.

It’s like this even at the small-scale level. I’ve gone to countless committee meetings with ideas, enthusiasm and faithfulness, only to realize (too late, usually) that these are just the qualities these committees don’t want. Through repeated heartbreak I’ve finally learned that if I feel like I’m crashing a party when I try to get involved with some Quaker cause, then it’s a sign that it’s time to get out of there! I’ve been in so many meetinghouses where I’ve been the only person within ten years of my age in either direction that I’m genuinely startled when I’m in a roomful of twenty- and thirty-somethings.

I recently had lunch with one of the thirtysomething Friends who have left. He had been drawn to Friends because of their mysticism and their passion for nonviolent social change; he was still very committed to both. But after organizing actions for years, he concluded that the Friends in his meeting didn’t think the peace testimony could actually inspire us to a witness that was so bold.

I wrote about this lunch conversation on my website and before long another old Friend surfaced. Eight years ago a witness and action conference inspired him to help launch a national Quaker youth volunteer network. He put years of his life into this; his statements on the problems and promises facing Quaker youth are still right on the mark. But after early excitement his support evaporated and the project eventually fell apart in what he’s described as “a bitter and unsuccessful experience.”

The loss of Quaker peers has hit close to home for me. When one close Friend learned my wife had left Quakerism for another church after eleven years, all he could say was how pleased he was that she had finally found her spiritual home; others gave similar empty- sounding platitudes. I felt like saying to them “No, you dimwits, we’ve driven away yet another Friend!” Each of these three lost Friends remain deeply committed to the Spirit and are now involved in other religious societies.

Young adults haven’t always been as invisible or uninvolved as they are now. A whole group of the Quaker leaders currently in their fifties and sixties were given important jobs at Quaker organizations at very tender ages (often right out of college). Also, there’s historical precedent for this: George Fox was 24 when he began his public ministry; Samuel Bownas was 20 when he was roused out of his meetinghouse slumber to begin his remarkable ministry; even Margaret Fell was still in her thirties when she was convinced. When the first generation of Friends drew together a group of their most important elders and ministers to address one of their many crises, the average age of the gathering was 35. Younger Friends haven’t always been ghettoized into Young

Audlt Friends only dorms, programs, workshops or committees.

There is hope. Some have started noticing that young Friends who go into leadership training programs often disappear soon afterwards. The powers that be at Friends General Conference have finally started talking about “youth ministry.” (Welcome!). A great people might possibly be gathered from the emergent church movement and the internet is full of amazing conversations from new Friends and seekers. There are pockets in our branch of Quakerism where older Friends have continued to mentor and encourage meaningful and integrated youth leadership, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most hopefully, there’s a whole new generation of twenty- something Friends on the scene with strong gifts that could be nurtured and harnessed.

In the truest reality, our chronological ages melt away in the ever-refreshing currents of the Living Spirit; we are all as children to a loving God. Will Friends come together to remember this before our religious society loses another generation?

Martin Kelley is a member of Atlantic City Monthly Meeting, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He works for FGC as the webmaster and bookstore secretary. This article is written from his experience.