A beautiful meditation on Quakers softening on the ideas of times and seasons and how he (and I suspect many other Friends) have come to more fully embrace the seasons of both the wider Christian Church and also the natural seasons of the earth and cosmos.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ quakers
Amor vincat Be Ready to Answer the Phone
August 20, 2026
Thoughts on the surprise Truitt family visit yesterday, because I know Quakers can be really really bad at this… Make sure you have a website that lists a phone number that rings through to a real person in real time. One that also lists an email that will be promptly read and answered. This event came together pretty fast. From the first phone call from township official Stacy Webb late Tuesday afternoon to my unlocking the meetinghouse doors was about 24 hours.
I was on a video call when Stacy’s first call came in so I had to let it go to voicemail. So also have voicemail set up. After my previous call ended I was able to reply to Stacy’s email and then followup with a quick call to confirm details. This was one less detail she had to worry about in an event with lots of moving parts. (In addition to a half dozen Truitt family members we had the mayor, deputy mayor, township manager, a police liaison, and a communications staffer with a camera. That’s a lot of people to coordinate.) In a lull in the event, Stacy told me it was great that she find and reach someone at Cropwell Meeting so easily.
I know communication can be hard but we need to be accessible. I’ve been ghosted SO MANY TIMES when trying to call or email Quaker meetings. And it’s not just the small ones that don’t get back to me. Sometimes meetings with paid office staff also don’t return messages. Cropwell uses a Google Voice number to forward phone calls to my personal cell and emails also automatically forward to me. It’s not overwhelming, not in the least — I let things forward to voicemail when I need to and I have ringers turned off at night. But because Cropwell set this up even before I became involved, I’ve been able to respond to inquiries quickly, once even as I was driving to meeting on Sunday morning (don’t worry, I pulled over). People already think we’re extinct. Don’t give them more reasons to think that’s true.
Truitt Family Visits Meeting
August 20, 2026
I had a wonderful time playing host for a visit by an old Cropwell Meeting family that was visiting the area this week. The Truitts were a free Black family in Delaware who joined self-emancipating enslaved people in that state and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to settle among South Jersey Quakers in the early 1800s. The highlight was definitely 103 year old Margaret Adele McGee, who told stories of worshiping at Cropwell in the 1920s!
Cropwell Quakers Reddit Thread on Quakers and Generative AI Art
August 4, 2026
An interesting Reddit thread on “Quakers and Generative AI Art” by user balsawoodspirit.
I encourage Friends to please remember that Generative AI art is produced unethically from AI models that scrape the work of real artists without consent or compensation. In the last few weeks, I have encountered two instances of Quakers using Generative AI as a part of their Outreach. This is deeply disturbing to me. There is no legitimate reason to use Generative AI Art. You can use open source images, you can hire artists, or you can make your own art. Or, use no art at all. Better that than to steal from artists and display art you hand no hand in making.
My Facebook feed is awash in terrible AI art accompanied by terrible AI-written feel-good stories, shared as much by Quakers as by any other demographic (my bad for still being on there, perhaps).
Quakerism is a spirituality that requires active participation. You can’t just nod off in the back (well, you can but you shouldn’t). Quaker communities have been lived experiences. As someone who works daily with writers, it’s stunning just how much AI has become a crutch for people. There are some very active writers in Quaker online spaces whose work is mostly AI. Is it for the social boost that comes from being ubiquitous?
A weird tangent but hear me out: if you read a lot of classic Quaker journals, there’s frequently stories from their teens in which the author consciously wrestles with plain dress. They talk about the lost friendships that came when they adopted a more uniform style and also about how hard it is to discern and navigate the inevitable voice of pride inside themselves (look at me, I’m plain!) with their legitimate wish and leading to be of use to the fellowship. That process of wrestling with ego is something that never ends for any of us, but especially not one of these ministers. Knowing when ministry is Spirit-led or ego-fed is a core competency for this work. In the end, the dress didn’t matter so much. But the “baby steps” of worrying about it was an early workout of those discernment muscles.
When we turn to AI we stop working those muscles and offload so much to the machine. Skipping the baby steps means we’re not necessarily going to be as practiced when important decisions need to be made. Let’s put out bad art if it means we’ll start learning how to put out more authentic art as we develop.
U.S, Quaker Colleges Responding to War in the 1940s
July 31, 2026
From Sergei Grushko, a look at the choices of Quaker institutions in a time of war:
World War II presented a severe challenge for American colleges. But perhaps no group faced a more difficult dilemma than the institutions of higher education founded by Quakers. How could they reconcile a centuries-old witness to peace with the need to survive?
I didn’t know much of this history and never thought about the existential threats to higher education in the 1940s when campuses were largely emptied of their male students.
The Peaceable Kingdom Lost
June 30, 2026
A story by Charles Fox of just a few of the massacres of Indigenous people in Pennsylvania in the late 1700s. While the Friends and Moravians often harbored endangered Susquehannock, their pacifism meant they were largely unable to stop the marauding Scots-Irish who were doing the killing.
As one historian wrote:
The frontier did collapse in late 1763. The surprise was that the armed mob that descended from the frontier into Lancaster — and then to Philadelphia in 1764 — were White frontiersmen. Everybody had expected it would be Indians.
Even more tragically, a few of the people who escaped the mobs ended up being slaughtered in later attacks. Much of the colonial government wasn’t Quaker in the latter half of the century, including some of William Penn’s descendants. Still, Friends today can wonder whether the high-minded promises of eternal friendship between Quakers and Indigenous Peoples were more hollow and aspirational than we’d like to admit. (Of course most of the Lenape and Susquehannock died from European-imported diseases, with every boatload of settlers bringing more death to the original inhabitants.)
Johan Maurer: Whose faith? Whose practice?
April 16, 2026
Johan Maurer brings up a question in a post about what was the London Yearly Meeting’s book of Christian Faith and Practice. He asks whether our practices should be treated as models we’d expect other Christians to follow.
I suppose that in either case, Christian or Quaker, the prevailing assumption was that these books are for internal use among Friends. This is who we are, more or less. But what I like about the title Christian Faith and Practice is another interpretation entirely, one I have no permission or evidence to propose: this way of faith and life is not just for us; it’s recommended for all Christians.
I’d argue a strong yes to this. When I think about what ancient Quaker oddities might still be relevant, one of the questions I ask myself is whether we could argue that the whole church should also adopt the practice (however unlikely that might be in reality). If it’s just some Quaker canard, we can toss it into an antiquity dustbin. But if all Christians should be following the practice, then let’s set the example.
I like Thomas Clarkson’s historical account of Friends particularly because he’s not writing for a Quaker audience. I get the feeling he’s holding our practices up for scrutiny, as if to say that maybe everyone should be following them and indeed, his pacifism and abolitionism were greatly influenced by the Friends he met in his work.
Of course this witness to other Christians sort of falls apart if we don’t consider ourselves Christian. If online discourse is any indication, there are large numbers of Quakers who are rather oblivious that almost all of our Quaker identity has a biblical basis (selective, of course, and also interpreted, debated and changing). Quakerism is seen as something that just randomly popped up in the world. None of the early Friends would have thought that.
Tim Gee tracks down Ann Lee’s Quaker connection
March 17, 2026
I always love a little sleuthing and all the better if it argues against some poorly researched report that made its way to Wikipedia.
The claim is that Shaker leader Ann Lee was born a Quaker. The Wikipedia entry says: “Her parents were members of a distinct branch of the Society of Friends (a sect of Quakers) and too poor to afford their children even the rudiments of education.” The source of this is given in the citation: a 1879 encyclopedia article, a copy of which is hosted on Wikisource: “Her parents were members of a distinct branch of the society of Friends, and too poor to afford their children even the rudiments of education.” A source for this claim was never given in the encyclopedia, though later on it does reference Frederick William Evans, a much later Shaker figure.
That is the Tim Gee compiles five pieces of evidence that together feel very convincing.
There are of course influences but that’s to be expected. Every religious movement of the Second Great Awakening had some relationship to Quakers. The Methodists, Mormons, Holiness, Adventists all have some connections. When you tour the “1652 Country” area of England, where George Fox first brought Quakers together, you’ll keep running into signs about John Wesley doing the same for Methodists a century later, and here in South Jersey where I live a whole slew of Quakers became Methodists in the early 1800s. At least one early Mormon evangelist in Ohio essentially went from Quaker town to Quaker town trying to recruit people. The Quaker defense of female leadership and the principle that women can preach obviously rubbed off on the Shakers and other movements.
The idea that the British colonies in America were some pure land where we could reinvent a primitive Christianity was a powerful meme (if you will) at the time and certainly drew Ann Lee to cross over and plant a religious movement here. But Ann Lee picked one of the least Quaker areas to plant her community and drew early members from New England millennialist revivalists. She definitely wanted to build something distinct from Friends.