Like everyone, we quickly pieced together the horror happening in real time: second plane, jumpers, collapsed. I was publishing Nonviolence.org then, a peace portal, and felt I had to say something, anything, so I rushed to the public computer at the local library. There was a queue of worried patrons wanting to message loved ones. In a few moments I typed out some rushed words:

Today’s terrorist attacks are simply horrendous, thousands of innocents might well lose their lives. Most important now is to sit patiently, to pray and to not call for massive indiscriminant attacks that might only kill thousands more. Our character as a nation is being tested now. We must pray and heal and not respond in a hatred that will only fuel the cycle of war, global injustice

We know how that turned out. Three thousand dead in New York and Western Pennsylvania, followed by hundreds of thousands in Western Asia. Decades of wars in Afghanistan. A second war in Iraq prompted by the flimsiest and most unlikely of excuses. Today, after all the blood, those countries are hostile and unstable. Yet two of the countries co-responsible were U.S. allies, are still U.S. allies. The 9/11 attacks was planned and largely executed by Saudis; Osama bin Laden was finally found living out in the open in Pakistan in an upper class compound a short walk from the gates of the country’s military academy. I’m glad we didn’t invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan but it makes one wonder what the other wars were meant to accomplish.

This week many people are gathering to remember 9/11, as they should. It was a horrific attack. It struck our sense of safety and fueled nightmares and tears. But when do we as U.S. citizens gather to think about how we reacted? When do we remember hundreds of thousands who have died since 9/11 in the name of retribution and a fearful revenge we’ve called freedom?

Also, an early plug that the December Friends Journal will focus on Quakers and Christianity.

Quakerism without Jesus
byu/Enilorac89 inQuakers

It’s one of those quotes we frequently hear: that George Fox said a minister’s job was “to bring people to Christ, and to leave them there.” But when I go to Google, I only find secondhand references, sandwiched in quote marks but never sourced. It turns up most frequently in the works of British Friend William Pollard, who used it as kind of a catch phrase in his talks on “An Old Fashioned Quakerism” from 1889. Suspiciously missing is any search result from the journal or epistles of Fox himself. It’s possible Pollard has paraphrased something from Fox into a speech-friendly shorthand that Google misses, but it’s also possible it’s one of those passed-down Fox myths like Penn’s sword.

So in modern fashion, I posed the question to the Facebook hive mind. After great discussions, I’m going to call this a half-truth. On the Facebook thread, Allistair Lomax shared a Fox epistle that convinces me the founder of Friends would have agreed with the basic concept:

I’m guessing it is paraphrase of a portion of Fox’s from epistle 308, 1674. Fox wrote “You know the manner of my life, the best part of thirty years since I went forth and forsook all things. I sought not myself. I sought you and his glory that sent me. When I turned you to him that is able to save you, I left you to him.”

Mark Wutka shared quotations from Stephen Grellet and William Williams which have convince me that it describes the “two step dance” of convincement for early Friends:

From Stephen Grellet: “I have endeavoured to lead this people to the Lord and to his Spirit, and there is is safe to leave them.” And this from William Williams: “To persuade people to seek the Lord, and to be faithful to his word, the inspoken words of the heart, is what we ought to do; and then leave them to be directed by the inward feelings of the mind;”

The two-step image comes from Angela York Crane’s comment:

So it’s a two step dance. First, that who we are and how we live and speak turns others to the Lord, and second, that we trust enough to leave them there.

But: as a pithy catch phrase directly attributed to Fox it’s another myth. It perhaps borrowed some images from a mid-19th century talk by Charles Spurgeon on George Fox, but came together in the 1870s as a central catch phrase of British reformer Friend William Pollard. Pollard is a fascinating figure in his own right, an early proponent of modern liberalism in a London Yearly Meeting that was then largely evangelical and missionary. Even his pamphlet and book titles were telling, including Primitive Christianity Revived and A Reasonable Faith. He had an agenda and this phrase was a key formulation of his argument and vision.

He is hardly the first or last Friend to have lifted an incidental phrase or concept of George Fox’s and given it the weight of a modern tenet (“That of God” springs to mind). More interesting to me is that Pollard’s work was frequently reprinted and referenced in Friends Intelligencer, the American Hicksite publication (and predecessor of Friends Journal), at a time when London Friends didn’t recognize Hicksites as legitimate Quakers. His vision of an “Old Fashioned Quakerism” reincorporated quietism and sought to bring British Friends back to a two-step convincement practice. It paved the way for the transformation of British Quakerism following the transformational 1895 Manchester Conference and gave American Friends interested in modern liberal philosophical ideals a blueprint for incorporating them into a Quaker framework.

The phrase “bring people to Christ/leave them there” is a compelling image that has lived on in the 130 or so odd years since its coinage. I suspect it is still used much as Pollard intended: as a quietist braking system for top-down missionary programs. It’s a great concept. Only our testimony in truth now requires that we introduce it, “As William Pollard said, a Quaker minister’s job is to…”

And for those wondering, yes, I have just ordered Pollard’s Old Fashioned Quakerism via Vintage Quaker Books. He seems like something of a kindred spirit and I want to learn more.

Here’s another installation of mom stories, originally written for a longer obituary than the one running in today’s paper.

A single parent, she earned an associates degree at Rider College in Trenton and worked as a secretary at a number of Philadelphia-area based organizations, include Women’s Medical College and the Presbyterian Board of Publications. In the mid-1960s she became an executive secretary at the newly-formed Colonial Penn Life Insurance Company. An office feminist, she liked recounting the story of the day in the 1970s when the women of the office united to break the dress code by all wearing pant suits. A senior vice president was on the phone when she walked into his office and is said to have told his caller “My secretary just walked in wearing pants.… and she looks terrific!”

When Colonial Penn later started an in-house computer programmer training program, she signed up immediately and started a second career. She approached programs as puzzles and was especially proud of her ability to take other programmers’ poorly-written code and turn it into efficient, bug-free software.

In the early 1990s, she moved into her own apartment in Jenkintown, Pa. She reclaimed a shortened form of her maiden name and swapped “Betsy” for “Liz.” During this time she became a committed attender at Abington Friends Meeting. As clerk of its peace and justice committee, she worked to build the consensus needed for the meeting to produce a landmark statement on reproductive rights. As soon as it was passed she said, “next up, a minute on same-sex marriage!” In the late 90s, that was still controversial even with LGBTQ circles and I imagine that even the progressive folks at Abington were dreading the thought she might put this on the agenda!

In her late 60s, she bought her first house, in Philadelphia’s Mount Airy neighborhood. She loved fixing it up and babysitting her grandchildren. She never made any strong connections with any of the nearby Quaker Meetings only attending worship sporadically after the move. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease in 2010, she took the news with dignity. She moved into an independent living apartment in Atco, N.J. and continued an active lifestyle as long as possible.

Rain camping

A video posted by Martin Kelley (@martin_kelley) on Jun 19, 2015 at 5:57pm PDT

And while I assumed the name was some sort of Lenape construction, it’s apparently an amalgam of Atlantic City Area Girl Scout Camp.

Earlier this month we took a family trip to the “Three Forts” along the lower Delaware—Fort DuPont on the Delaware side, Fort Mott in New Jersey, and Fort Delaware right in the middle (okay, it’s officially Delaware, meaning our hosts were the excellent staff of the Delaware Park Service). This weekend I went back with the two older boys on an overnight campout.

The island is only accessible by ferry. Most nights, the entire staff disembark back to Delaware on the last ferry (we joined them last time) but for the first time in anyone’s memory, they had this campout. If our family didn’t scare them they might make it a more regular event.

We camped out in the old marching ground right inside the fort and got to walk around all of the safe parts of the fort. In addition, the staff had lots of great programs:

• Scavenger hunt
• Paranormal ghost tour including the normally-closed Endicott Tunnel
• Campfire with s’mores
• I did the nature trail on north side of island in near pitch black
• A night vision workshop about how nocturnal animals see in the dark (rods and cones in the eye).
• The camping of course
• In the morning there was a guided nature walk where we learned about birds and mammals on island.

And because I like shooting time lapse videos lately, here are two. In the first the sun rises over the river. In the second we ride the tram from Fort Delaware to the ferry dock. If you’re interested in low-res videos of bridge crossings, spooky night wanderings, or ghost sightings then follow the links. There’s also a more complete Flickr set of the trip.

Four of us were asked to talk about our work in marketing our Quaker organizations. We represented a mix of organizations. In addition to myself representing Friends Journal, there was: Chris Hardie, founder of a Summersault LLC, a technology and web hosting business; Margaret Stark, director of marketing and admissions at Kendal at Oberlin, a continuing care retirement community “in the Quaker tradition”; and Tom Farquhar, head of of Washington, D.C.

Other recorded talks include plenary talks from Ian Joyce and Thom Jeavons, and the first speakers panel that included Norval Reece, Barry Crossno, Betty Tonsing, and Christina Repoley.

This was what we were working on last week, when I tweeted out asking how many Quakers does it take to shoot a seven-second video!

As you might all expect, I’m really happy with the move. Color won’t add very much to the overall budget just 1.5 percent!) but it should help us reach new readers. I’m also hoping it will give lapsed readers a reason to open the magazine again and see what we’ve been doing the last few years. Subscriptions start at a very reasonable $25. If you sign up before July 8, you’ll get August’s very first color issue!