Quakers have been asking some very hard questions about their testimony to peace and their forms of pacifism following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. They are hard because there are no simple right answers.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ Quaker
Oooh!, a Quaker zine
March 6, 2023
Wess Daniels got a pack of Quaker zines in the mail. That’s right, physical paper:
A few weeks back, I got some mail from someone I didn’t know. As I opened it, these cute little booklets fell out, and a letter addressed to me: Hello, Mr. Daniels. The letter writer, Pacific Northwest Quaker Natalie Ramsland, told me a little about how she came into zine making and why she was sending me some of her zines.
That’s very cool! I zined back in college: “The Vacuum” ran every Friday for most of two years. When I was doing a nonviolence website in the mid-90s it seemed natural to apply this model and I accidentally started blogging, complete with mirroring it to an email list (I wrote “Fifteen Years of Blogging” eleven years ago, whoa!). Now my blog automatically goes out by email on Fridays. There’s such an obvious through-line between the 90s zine and my ongoing blogging (and obviously we have weekly content cycles for Friends Journal too).
I love the idea of paper zines coming back though their limit has always been that the best distribution is local and misses those of us out of the geographic loop.
Zine-makerNatalie also has a Substack, which I’ll be reading eagerly.
Circling around, and surprising nudges toward renewed ministry and plainness
February 19, 2023
From LizOpp, back on the blog:
I have come to believe that I live my life not in a straight line from birth to death but in a series of small and large circles: from birth to learning; from growth to forgetting; from remembering to prideful living; from brokenness to humility; from deep love and connection to separateness; from despair to faithfulness.
I too have felt circles coming back around. Liz attended last weekend’s workshop, the first multi-day retreat I’ve led since… check notes… 2014, when R. Scot Miller got me to Kalamazoo, Michigan, for Green Pastures Quarterly Meeting. Last year I finally stopped my meeting wandering and have settled down at Cropwell Meeting, where I get to be involved in all the silly, lightweight dramas that occur whenever a group of people come together.
There, I’ve felt my spoken ministry return. I was shocked a few months ago when I stood and was given words that started with reflecting of the sounds of the leaves blowing against the outside walls, referenced an attender who had just been sweeping them, circled to the history of the people who have gathered within those walls and maintained the building for worship, moved sideways into a gentle lesson on ministry in the quietist tradition, pulled it back to Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, and then tied it up in a bow with prayers of thanks to our faithful ancestors and to those today who continue to sweep away the ever-returned leaves. Readers, let me assure you I don’t think I’ve ever given such coherent, balanced ministry and I’m not sure where it came from. But faithfulness is key.
I’ve also felt the nudge to bring back some identifiable plain dress. For years I’ve tended toward what I used to call “Sears plain“1 and during the work-from-home life I’m sometimes lucky if I get through the day without still wearing my pajamas. Over the last few weeks I’ve been adding suspenders to my regular clothes. Of course I’ve gone through all the old familiar self-questioning: Am I doing this to stand out? Am I trying to puff myself up? Is this what faithfulness leads me? But these questions are part of the process and a tug toward plainness often precedes outward ministry; in his study Quaker Journals, Howard Brinton noted that future ministers often recorded inward nudges in their teen years and became plainer in dress to the ridicule of their peers. I’m not a teen and I doubt anyone is going to make fun of me (at least to my face) but I do feel a certain seriousness of intent come over me when I overcome my natural desire for social anonymity and put the suspenders on.
Writing Opp: Quaker Leadership
January 23, 2023
My “Editor’s Desk” post announcing the upcoming June/July issue of Friends Journal on #Quaker leadership.
Following the money in a downsizing Quaker meeting
January 20, 2023
From Adria Gulizia’s series on dying meetings:
Finally, we might see dying meetings disinvest from their First Day School programs, as the needs of parents and children are tacitly acknowledged to be in competition with those of settled older adults. Those with power and longevity in the community ensure that their needs keep getting met, while increasingly neglecting those they are called to serve — children, those new to our faith, people in prison, people with disabilities and people who are struggling financially.
Friends instead spend their dwindling resources on internal priorities and the expenses associated with keeping a meetinghouse well-warmed, well-lit and well cared-for — even if there’s nobody in it.
When doing outreach, you have to focus less about the people in the meetinghouse and more on the people who would be joining if they knew we existed and were welcomed in. So too, I think, for our priorities in a shrinking meeting. It’s easy to turn inward and just keep the status-quo rolling. I see meetings in well-populated areas that are shrinking and not doing what they need to do to be more visible in their local community.
Quaker sing song ministry
January 4, 2023
Over on Mastodon (yes you should be there), Australian Friend Evan started an interesting discussion about Quaker sing song. This is a form of delivering ministry that seems to date back to the beginnings of our religious society but which barely exists anymore. To my untrained ears it sounds more like something you’d hear in a small Catholic or Orthodox church. Many years ago Haverford College Library excerpted a field recording on a page dedicated to Music and the Early Quakers:
Evan posts to a passage on it from nineteenth-century Quaker chronicler Thomas Clarkson:
The Quakers, on the other hand, neither prepare their discourses, nor vary their voices purposely according to the rules of art. The tone which comes out, and which appears disagreeable to those who are not used to it, is nevertheless not unnatural. It is rather the mode of speaking which na- ture imposes in any violent exertion of the voice, to save the lungs. Hence persons who have their wares to cry, and this almost every other minute in the streets, are obliged to adopt a tone. Hence persons, with disordered lungs, can sing words with more ease to themselves than they can utter th6m with a similar pitch of the voice. Hence Quaker- women, when they preach, have generally more of this tone than the Quaker-men, for the lungs of the female are generally weaker than those of the other
sex.
I’ve always wondered if later opposition to sing song might have been partially motivated by the fact that it was favored by women or sounded a bit too Catholic for Anglicans like Clarkson or Quakers leaning that direction.
There’s a great 2011 post from the now-dormant Quaker Historical Lexicon blog by Illinois Friend Peter Lasersohn. The comments are also great.
Quakers on Mastodon
November 25, 2022
Every day brings more news of existential trouble at Twitter. It’s new overlord is openly engaging with White supremacists and talking garbage about the service’s algorithm had long had a liberal bias (spoiler: not true). Banned accounts are being reinstated and there’s a list circulating in rightwing circles of left-leaning accounts they’re trying to get banned.
In all this I’ve been switching over to Mastodon, a decentralized network whose structure isolates it from the kind of takeover and consolidation we’re seeing at Twitter. My account there is writing.exchange/@martin. There are dozens of beginner’s guides available if you’re thinking of making the switch. If you’re looking for Quakers on the service, you can check out my following/followers list, which is chock full of them (probably about 2/3rds of my list are Quaker or Quaker-adjacent). Once you set up you should post an introductory post with hashtagged interests. I follow the quaker and quakers hashtag and will spot you right away. There is a Quakers group as well. Friends Journal also has a new account there, at mastodon.lol/@friendsjournal.
Other places to get your online Quaker fix include the Quakers subreddit and a very chatty Discord server (follow the link from the subreddit for an invite). Two other services getting buzz are Post (where I’m on the waiting list) and Hive (where I have a placeholder account at @martinkelley).
The documents of Quaker slavery
February 28, 2022
Today Friends Journal is featuring two interviews in two media on the manumission project out of Haverford College. As it happens, I’m the interviewer on both!
For those of you turning to the dictionary, manumissions are the documents promising the freedom of enslaved humans. Despite our popular image, Quakers enslaved Africans for over a century, starting with Quaker on Barbados in the 1660s. That island was the first fabulously successful British colony in the Western Hemisphere and that economy was built on sugar and slaves. Quaker missionaries converted slave-owning White Barbadians.1
Barbados became less friendly to Quakers in following decades (repressive laws, natural disasters) and many moved to William Penn’s new colony in the 1680s, bringing their enslaved people and a Quaker acceptance of human bondage with them. Katherine Gerbner’s “Slavery in the Quaker World” is a good place to start with this history (and yes, I interviewed her too a few years ago).
Some Friends started formally writing against slavery starting in 1688 but rich, slave-holding Friends (including William Penn) didn’t agree and the protests were shelved. It wasn’t until 1776 that Friends in Philadelphia formally acknowledged that human bondage and Quaker principles were opposed. Slave-owning Friends had two choices: free those in their bondage or be disowned from the religious society.
The manumission papers are the receipts of the former Friends. Copies of the freedom promises were sent up the chain of Quaker bureaucracy as proof and eventually ended up in the archives of Haverford College.
My first interview, “Inside Haverford’s Manumission Archives,” is with David Satten-López, the Haverford fellowship student who digitized a portion of these records, and Mary Crauderueff, who heads Haverford’s Quaker collections.
The second interview is a video conversation with Avis Wanda McClinton, a strong voice on remembering the Quaker history of forced bondage.
I’m so glad we’re talking about this tragic history more and happy that folks like Avis, Mary, and David have let me be part of the conversation.