Please feel free to email me at martink@martinkelley.com if you have any ideas or feedback or just want to say hi!

Learn more about my work at MartinKelley.com. I’d love to come visit your meeting or Quaker space to give a workshop on Quakerism. If you haven’t yet subscribed to the weekly Quaker Ranter email newsletter, you can do so here.

In her September Friends Journal article, Young Friends Want What Early Quakers Had, Olivia Chalkley talks about the young Catholic traditionalist scene (aka “the tradddies”):

As a Twitter user, I have a front row seat to the bizarre wave of traditionalist Catholicism that’s sweeping New York’s Dimes Square arts scene and garnering media attention. In my own life, I have numerous friends and acquaintances who were raised with little to no religion and are now starting Bible study groups, attending church regularly, and even taking catechism classes.

What would this look like for Friends? Olivia says it would have progressive values (her 2020 QuakerSpeak interview is A Quaker Take on Liberation Theology). How could we do outreach to young adults who might want a more serious and nerdy Quakerism without alienating spiritual-but-not-religious seekers looking for a spiritually-neutral hour of silence? (See Pareto Curve outreach.) Also the big question: is this just a fever dream for a few of us stuck in a bubble? Is there really an opportunity for something widespread enough to call a movement? Youth-led Quaker movements have happened before: New Swarthmoor, Young Friends North America, and Movement for a New Society all created hip subcultures (albeit without overt spirituality in the latter’s case). On a smaller, decidedly less-hip fashion, networks like New Foundation Fellowship, QuakerSpring, Ohio YM’s outreach efforts, and School of the Spirit all continue to provide opportunities for nerdy Friends wanting to go deep into Quaker spirituality.

I’m a bit skeptical, to be honest, but some things in the wider spiritual culture have been changing the calculus:

• As Olivia points out, Generation Z is more unchurched than any in recent memory; some of its members are looking for something more substantial and directive;
• The internet continues to make non-mainstream movements ever easier to find and communities easier to organize;
• Online worship has made it easier for seekers to “shop around” for a non-local spiritual community that might better “speak to their condition,” to use the Quaker lingo.

These cultural changes aren’t limited to youth, of course. A regular Quaker Ranter reader emailed me a few weeks ago to say that she’s started attending online worship hundreds of miles away after her longtime meeting “become less and less a worshiping community and more and more a  collection of nice individuals.” The at-a-distance meeting “it is the spiritual home I had stopped looking for!” I’m kind of curious where these currents are going to be taking Friends of all generations.

Olivia and I talk about much of this in the latest FJ Author Chat.

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What topics would YOU like to see Friends Journal addressing in the future?

We’ve been running themed issues for over a decade now. Check out the list of themes since 2012 or look through the archives to reminiscence about past issues. There’s a good chance we’ve already covered the subject you’re interested in, but it might be a good time for us to take a new look or a fresh spin. Leave a comment here or email me at martin@friendsjournal.org with any ideas you have.

I put this all together using an absolutely ridiculous Microsoft Word macro that I had adapted. I’d write a post in Word then hit a button. A long string of search and replaces would start to run. For example, one search would look for boldest text and put “<b>” and “</b>” around it. After half a minute or so it’d spit out an HTML file to my desktop. I’d open an FTP program and upload the file to the server. If I had an edit to make I’d have to go through the macro all over again. I was teaching myself HTML as I went along and it’s amazing any of it displayed properly.

Still, it’s remarkable that while so much of back end has changed and changed again over the decades, the final format is instantly recognizable as a blog. The Quaker Ranter archives now list over 1,300 articles.

The Early Blogging Days | Quaker Ranter

www.quakerranter.org

The primary benefit for now is the knowledge you’re helping to share a wider Quaker conversation, though in the future I’ll experiment with some interesting member-only discussions. Thanks! –Martin

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