Tag Archives ⇒ quakers

Influencing Quakers

July 2, 2025
· Martin Kelley

Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing and Friends in Busi­ness spon­sored a two-person pan­el last night called “Quak­er Voic­es, Dig­i­tal Paths” and fea­tur­ing Glo­ria Sul­li­van, who has over 600,000 fol­low­ers across Tik­Tok and Insta­gram, and Grif­fin Macaulay, con­tent cre­ator for Dun­geons and Drag­ons. Glo­ria does­n’t gen­er­al­ly talk about being a Quak­er on her chan­nel but did in Jan­u­ary. It’s had over 300,000 views and a stag­ger­ing 6,042 comments. 

@_gloyoyo_

quick notes on quak­erism☮️✌️🕊️ #quak­er #quak­erism #quak­ers #iced­cof­feeath­ome #iced­cof­fee #easy­iced­cof­feeath­ome

♬ orig­i­nal sound — Glo

The scale of the new­er forms of online media is real­ly stag­ger­ing, as is the sim­plic­i­ty of start­ing a chan­nel. There’s no need to incor­po­rate or find fun­ders or write mis­sion state­ments: you just start talk­ing to the com­put­er. It quick­ly becomes all-consuming of course, and there’s a lot of thought that goes into the top­ics and scope of the chan­nel. All the pop­u­lar Tik­Toks also have lots of edits to speed them up. It’s a lot of work to do this part or full-time.

Grif­fin talked about being known for a thing and remain­ing pas­sion­ate about it even in a vac­u­um. It’s the follow-your-passion advice: lov­ing what you do will pull peo­ple to you and you will find a way to turn it into a business.

In some ways, I feel that at least some of the work my col­leagues and I are doing 1is akin to an out­field­er scan­ning the sky for pop balls com­ing in from these inter­net men­tions. When a pop­u­lar influ­encer talks about Quak­ers I’m sure hun­dreds of fin­gers open a new tab to ask “What is a Quak­er?” and “What Do Quak­ers Believe?” We hope­ful­ly show up in the search with easily-digestible answers and links to Quak­er com­mu­ni­ties. I asked Glo­ria and Grif­fin for ideas about how we could bet­ter sup­port inquir­ers they might send our way. We’re doing a lot already — good search engine opti­miza­tion, catchy URLs — but there was some good advice on using Insta­gram bet­ter and real­ly sim­pli­fy­ing our mes­sag­ing and turn­ing it into stories. 

Peter Blood-Patterison on Under-the-Radar Revival

June 24, 2025
· Martin Kelley

“In my trav­els and expe­ri­ence with Quak­ers today, I encounter Friends who are going deep­er, learn­ing more about the rad­i­cal faith roots of our faith com­mu­ni­ty, and are will­ing and able to hear oth­ers’ voic­es and expe­ri­ences with “lis­ten­ing in tongues” (learn­ing to trans­late oth­ers’ words about the Holy into lan­guage that speaks to their own con­di­tion). I believe this under-the-radar Quak­er revival will con­tin­ue to deep­en and grow in many ways and many places. How­ev­er, to my mind a great and last­ing Quak­er revival will require us to do the following:”

Just a moment...
Just a moment… 
www.friendsjournal.org www​.friend​sjour​nal​.org

Claire Flourish examines a Quaker anti-trans campaign

March 11, 2025
· Martin Kelley

Fas­ci­nat­ing and dis­turb­ing account of an out­spo­ken Quak­er* UK anti-trans activist who has start­ed a video pod­cast inter­view­ing promi­nent Friends. Most of the episodes have noth­ing to do with gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty but some do. 

The aster­isk up is there because the pod­cast­er appar­ent­ly renounced their mem­ber­ship in the Soci­ety of Friends when Britain Year­ly Meet­ing passed a minute on trans inclu­sion. I appre­ci­ate some­one dis­agree­ing with a year­ly meet­ing res­o­lu­tion and even stay­ing in the fold despite the oppo­si­tion. But when an affirm­ing minute that doesn’t actu­al­ly affect you (just your ide­ol­o­gy) is such a bur­den that you leave… well then the ques­tion is why you would put such effort into a pod­cast of your ex-religion. it doesn’t seem like a project borne in good faith. 

Claire does a great job bring­ing the receipts and explain­ing the con­text (the details of which I haven’t been following). 

A Quaker anti-trans campaign
A Quak­er anti-trans campaign 

How much work will Quak­ers do to wel­come trans peo­ple, after our year­ly meet­ing min­utes expressed such powerful…

Clare Flourish Clare Flourish 

Presentation on the Underground Railroad in South Jersey

May 5, 2023
· Martin Kelley

Locals: I’m real­ly excit­ed about a pro­gram Crop­well Meet­ing is host­ing this Sun­day: local his­to­ri­an Paul W. Schopp will come and talk about his­tor­i­cal Black towns around Marl­ton, South Jer­sey, and their involve­ment in the Under­ground Railroad.

The Quak­er con­nec­tion is not just the venue of course. The ear­li­est Friends in the Marl­ton area enslaved Africans, which was the norm among Quak­ers in the ear­li­est colo­nial days. From my read­ings, slav­ery was on the decline (immi­grat­ing Ger­mans were a more desir­able work­force) until the dis­rup­tions of the French and Indi­an war threat­ened to kick the slave trade back into high gear, which in turn inspired a new gen­er­a­tion of Quak­er abo­li­tion­ism. This includ­ed Joshua Evans, of what lat­er became Marlton/Cropwell, who was a trav­el­ing com­pan­ion of the more well-remembered John Wool­man in his anti­slav­ery trav­el­ing ministry.

By the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, most Quak­er towns in South Jer­sey had freed Black towns near­by, on land typ­i­cal­ly deed­ed by Quak­er farm­ers. Friends have a ten­den­cy to some­times over-sell our his­tor­i­cal involve­ment in the Under­ground Rail­road but the real key to the rail­road­’s suc­cess were these freed Black towns. In the area around Crop­well, a town called Mil­ford (now Kres­son) served this role. I don’t know any­thing about it specif­i­cal­ly but Schopp has stud­ied it, along with lots of these his­tor­i­cal Black towns and I’m very inter­est­ed to learn more about them.

Fol­low the link below for some more on Mil­ford, includ­ing a TV episode fea­tur­ing two descen­dants of the Tru­itt fam­i­ly and part­ly filmed at Crop­well Meeting.

https://​crop​wellquak​ers​.org/​m​a​y​-​7​-​p​a​u​l​-​w​-​s​c​h​opp

Truth and integrity retreat

February 14, 2023
· Martin Kelley

My week­end online retreat went well, I think, at least many of the 15 par­tic­i­pants said they appre­ci­at­ed it. It’s the first multi-day event I’ve led in awhile and as I wrote here ear­li­er, I felt strong­ly led to plan a flex­i­ble, Spirit-led event. It was a bit ter­ri­fy­ing to be work­ing so from-the-seat-of-my-pants, but it was a great group of peo­ple, who could main­tain the pac­ing on their own. There was a lot of very deep shar­ing (I set con­fi­den­tial­i­ty as a val­ue ear­ly on) and we let peo­ple share for longer or share some­thing dif­fer­ent than asked if they felt it impor­tant. There were a few moments when it felt like a long state­ment might be bring­ing in too much cen­trifu­gal force but it pulled back and we were the rich­er for it. The hard­est time for me was around 4pm Sat­ur­day but that’s such a hard time to be alert. 

The two-day, three-part retreat was part of Windy Cool­er’s “Tes­ti­monies to Mer­cy” series, co-sponsored by New York’s Pow­ell House and Ben Lomond Cen­ter. Some ran­dom phras­es and ideas:

  • Integrity=Love, Integrity=Faithfulness, Integrity=Presence.
  • Truth with­out love is bru­tal­i­ty, and love with­out truth is hypocrisy: the much-quoted adage, attrib­uted to War­ren W. Wiers­be on sketchy quote websites.
  • Dis­ci­ples are fol­low­ers who aren’t moti­vat­ed by punishment.
  • The image that truth can chase us.

One of the more sur­pris­ing moments was when I brought in Hugh Bar­bour’s Five Tests for Dis­cern­ment. Par­tic­i­pants had been talk­ing about the mean­ing of Truth — Is there only one? Are there many? How do we know to con­tin­ue when oth­ers dis­agree? — and I thought Bar­bour’s list would be an easy one to lean on. He devel­oped it in the ear­ly six­ties as find­ings for research for his 1964 book, The Quak­ers in Puri­tan Eng­land and I remem­bered it as a rev­e­la­tion when I first came across it prob­a­bly twen­ty years ago. But the insis­tence on “moral puri­ty” and “inward uni­ty” did­n’t sit well with a group with mem­bers that have some­times had to buck Quak­er cul­tur­al mores and insti­tu­tion­al iner­tia to fol­low a lead­ing. We start­ed brain­storm­ing dif­fer­ent tests we’ve devel­oped more expe­ri­en­tial­ly. I’d love to tease these ideas out more someday.

Quakers on Mastodon

November 25, 2022
· Martin Kelley

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.

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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 writ​ing​.exchange/​@​m​a​r​tin. 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/​@​f​r​i​e​n​d​s​j​o​u​r​nal.

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).

Ask Me Anything: How easy is it to become a Quaker?

April 25, 2018
· Martin Kelley

I have an Ask Me Any­thing request from read­er Ruby M:

Hel­lo! I’m study­ing The Friends Church for aca­d­e­m­ic pur­pos­es and I’d love to hear from some­one with first­hand expe­ri­ence. How easy is it to become a quak­er? Do you ever feel peo­ple treat you dif­fer­ent­ly because you’re a quak­er? Do you think there should be more rep­re­sen­ta­tion of quak­ers in the media? Thank you so much for your time. I’m very eager to hear back from you!

Since my expe­ri­ence is just one data point, I hope oth­ers will use the com­ment sec­tion below to add their stories.

I found becom­ing a Quak­er to be some­thing of a spi­ral process. I first walked into a Friends meet­ing­house at the age of 20 and only slow­ly took on an iden­ti­ty as a Friend. At each step of the process, I learned more clear­ly what that might mean and have strived to grow into deep­er faith­ful­ness. I didn’t for­mal­ly apply for mem­ber­ship until a decade or so after I became a reg­u­lar atten­der. This time lag is not unheard of but I don’t think it’s usu­al. It’s more of an insight into my own care­ful­ness and ret­i­cence about join­ing things than it is an indi­ca­tion of any­thing the meet­ings I attend­ed required. When I did final­ly apply for mem­ber­ship I was quite qual­i­fied and want­ed the clear­ness process to be exact­ing: again, this is an insight into my psyche!

Most peo­ple on the street don’t quite know what Quak­ers are so I can’t say I’m always treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly. I guess see­ing more Quak­ers in the media would be help­ful, though giv­en our over­all small num­bers I sus­pect even our fleet­ing appear­ances in TV shows and movies are more than we might pro­por­tion­al­ly expect.

I’m inter­est­ed to hear how oth­er Friends would answer Ruby’s question.

 

Update: reader answers by email and commentary

Jes­si­ca F: I’ve want­ed to be a Quak­er since I learned about the Abo­li­tion­ists who helped with the Under­ground Rail­road and prison reform. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the movie Gen­tle Per­sua­sion pre­sent­ed Quak­ers as being against music so I became a Uni­tar­i­an instead. Even­tu­al­ly I learned that wasn’t true for many Quak­ers and I found that all of the val­ues I had devel­oped through the years were also Quak­er val­ues and so becom­ing a Quak­er gave me a sup­port sys­tem and a com­mu­ni­ty of like minds.