Pendle Hill had a practice of asking week-long students to take on a job on Wednesday afternoon. One week my task was to clean/dust and arrange the books in the Upmeads library and in the process I found, high on an upper shelf, a whole series of dusty pamphlets called the William Penn Lectures. Inaccessible? You bet. A few months later I sojourned at Pendle Hill while my late wife was taking a week-long course. During that week I sat with my computer and scanned the text of those pamphlets. My intent was to make that body of literature more accessible to Quakers and others throughout the world on the internet. And recently that goal has been achieved.

I know Jim well from his time on Friends Journal’s board of trustees and making Quaker archives accessible is a great passion of his. He helped us tremendously in getting older articles indexed. That combined with the Haverford College Library’s digitalization of everything going back to 1955 means we’re relatively accessible.

Speaking of archives, it looks like I’ve been remiss sharing another amazing resource: the Salem (NJ) Quarter Tape Archive. Starting in the late 1970s, people started taping long interviews with Friends. They’ve sat gathering dust until they were pulled out an digitized. Regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of Rachel Davis DuBois and her interview by Charles Crabbe Thomas (number 13) is absolute gold.

http://quakerspeak.com/welcome-to-quakerspeak-season‑6/?fbclid=IwAR1zbq8SwVPqaPecEEQSAoJrJ7MdSW2htwMxrjq5Xi51UCGMzI9MQt7deDE

As I am working on a revision of my book on the Quaker ministry, I am revisiting historical accounts of times when a minister was given guidance (eldering, oversight, nurture, discipline). As part of that work, I will from time to time post “case studies” on this blog.

Nuturing ministers: Case studies, Intro

Friends Journal Staff Picks

I got to publish a wonderful series of David’s pacifist writings online in that era when the web was becoming a thing. I also remember staying at his place on at least one of those visits and getting to meet one of his beloved felines. His interests were far more wide-ranging than the average activist’s and he was always ready to challenge group-think orthodoxies with an intellectual rigor I deeply appreciated.

I often found myself disagreeing with David (and I got the distinct impression he could get pretty unbearable at times), but he helped me see the consequences of my choices in a way that kept me honest.

I think I still look beyond my answers more readily because of conversations in David’s apartment. For all my qualms with Facebook, I’ve been grateful that it brought me back into David’s orbit in recent times and I will miss his commentary and discussions.

David McReynolds, Socialist Activist Who Ran for President, Dies at 88 (Published 2018)

His pacifist work spanned decades and several wars, and he twice ran for the White House as an…

www.nytimes.com

The help we want to give — the showy, busy, selfless work — is rarely the help that is needed. And the help that is needed is often boring, with no glamour to it. So, what is to be done? I don’t know. I want to continue my spiritual journey towards/with God; however, I am worried that maybe the Quakers aren’t the home for me that I want.

The post’s title is a response Mike gave in which he channeled his mother’s voice. It’s so spot-on that I can almost hear her say it (I have never met Mike or any of his family but have friends who could deliver that kind of a line with such under-the-radar nuance that more clueless listeners might miss the acres of shade in the tone.

https://small-wire.com/2018/08/15/i‑guess-ill-read-my-bible-elsewhere/

In my previous posts, the distinction between gathered and focused meetings seemed connected to one’s religious outlook, and thus related to the divide between Christ-centered and universalist Quakers that has bedeviled our faith for centuries. But as Sheeran and Kelley argue, the more fundamental divide in the liberal branch of Quakerism is between those who seek contact with the divine and those who don’t.

My post is, as Smith puts it, “nearly fifteen years old,” which is about the length of a social generation. I’m not sure if I’m in a good position to pontificate about what has and hasn’t changed. Much of my Quaker work is with interesting outliers, either one-or-one or as part of a loose tribe of Friends who passionately care about Quakerism and are willing to go into the weeds to understand it. I have very little recent experience with committees on local levels.

One useful concept that I’ve picked up in the last fifteen years is that of “functional atheism.” This bypasses a group’s self-stated understandings of faith to look at how its decision-making process actually works. An organization that is functionally atheist might be full of very devout people who together still decide actions in a completely secular way. I would guess this has become even more the norm among the acronymic soup of national Quaker organizations in the last fifteen years. In that time a lot of bright ideas have come and gone which flashed briefly with the fuel of donor money but which didn’t create a self-sustaining momentum to keep them going long term. Thinking more strategically about what people are seeking in their spiritual lives might have helped those cast seeds land on more fertile grounds.

The Difference Between a Gathered Meeting and a Focused Meeting (3)

Bonus: the 14-year-old comments on my piece include some gentle whining about Friends Journal between myself and a regular reader at the time. Now that I’m its senior editor I’m sure there remains plenty to grumble about.

We’ve seen seemingly stable countries fall apart under conditions like this. We claim American exceptionalism but history is littered with the corpses of democracies that didn’t make it. This will be the biggest test of our civic values in our lifetimes. We might well experience things the American republic has never seen: the imprisonment of a losing opposition leader, the rise of organized hate crimes, wholesale theft of incredible wealth by a new oligarchy, the divying up of the world back into empires… The model of a kind of alt right soft dictatorship is well developed by this point and Trump has been clear throughout both his career and his candidacy that it’s his vision.

We do not get to choose our era or the challenges it throws at us. Only someone with historical amnesia would say this is unprecedented in our history. The enslavement of millions and the genocide of millions more are dark stains indelibly soaked into the very founding of the nation. But much will change, particularly our naivity and false optimism in an inevitable forward progress of our national story. We must respond with courage and grace. We’re going to get a lesson in what’s really important. Time to engage.