As a lover of maps, I’ve often be intrigued by the environs  of the Delaware River. As the tides go up and down, the timelessness of the river becomes a kind of gentle solace to the industrialization along its banks. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the islands which somehow remain in its course. I’ve camped at Pea Patch Island down by Delaware and found a surprising family connection in its convoluted ownership. But closer to my commute is Petty Island, sitting alongside the New Jersey mainland a short distance north of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Petty Island is owned by the Citgo oil company and until just a few months ago was still dotted with its oil tanks and a large marine cargo facility. Satellite views still show this twentieth century industry. But in a very long and oftentimes-uncertain process it’s due to become part of New Jersey natural lands and eventually to become a preserve. The public is generally still not allowed on the island but there are occasional trips and on this past Saturday I got to tour the island.

We were very lucky to have Bob Shinn as our tour guide. He’s a walking encyclopedia of the island and the state geopolitics and waves of names and commercial uses it’s been through. He literally wrote the entry on Petty Island in the Philadelphia Encyclopedia. Not surprisingly there’s a lot of Quakers in the early recorded history and the deed between the first Quaker owner and three Lenape representatives is intact in the Haverford College collections (this deed was also a major part of a talk by Lenape–settler history given by Jean Soderlund a few months ago at Rancocas Meeting (see also her book Lenape Country)).

The ever-changing, never-settled history of the island continues with its name. Wikipedia, Google Maps, and—most importantly—Bob Shinn call it “Petty Island,” while the guard shack, welcome sign, NJ Audubon Society, and New Jersey Natural Lands Trust adds the possessive to make it “Petty’s Island.” The latter is especially awkward-sounding to my ears, as South Jersey place names characteristically drop the apostrophes over time (for example, the river landing named after Captain George May is now the town of “Mays Landing.”)

Remnants of the industrialization remain: the massive three-story loading facility has been kept to become the bones of a future visitors center; the adjacent asphalt parking area has just been replanted as a meadow and is mostly a lot of rocks and short blades of grass (with some Fowler’s toads!). We were lucky enough to be the first public group to be there since this had all been cleared away.

Bonus: I didn’t realize till we were about to get in our cars that South Jersey Trails was also on the tour. He wrote it up too! If you look carefully, I’m in the background of one of the shots, and now that I’m looking I think that’s him in some of mine.

• 1937, 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987 from Quakers World Wide: A History of FWCC by Herbert Hadley in 1991 (many thanks to FWCC’s Robin Mohr for a scan of the relevant chart).
• 1972, 1992 from Earlham School of Religion’s The Present State of Quakerism, 1995, archived here.
• 2002 on from FWCC directly. Note: Current 2017 map.

Friends in the U.S. and Canada:

• 1937: 114,924
• 1957: 122,663
• 1967: 122,780
• 1972: 121,380
• 1977: 119,160
• 1987: 109,732
• 1992: 101,255
• 2002: 92,786
• 2012: 77,660
• 2017: 81,392

Friends in Americas (North, Middle South):

• 1937: 122,166
• 1957: 131,000
• 1967: 129,200
• 1977: 132,300
• 1987: 139,200
• 2017: 140,065

You could write a book about what these numbers do and don’t mean. The most glaring omission is that they don’t show the geographic or theological shifts that took place over time. Midwestern Friends have taken a disproportionate hit, for example, and many Philadelphia-area meetings are much smaller than they were a century ago, while independent meetings in the West and/or adjacent to colleges grew like wildflowers mid-century.

My hot take on this is that the reunification work of the early 20th century gave Quakers a solid identity and coherent structure. Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years from 1952 is a remarkably confident document. In many areas, Friends became a socially-progressive, participatory religious movement that was attractive to people tired of more creedal formulations; mixed-religious parents came looking for First-day school community for their children. Quakers’ social justice work was very visible and attracted a number of new people during the antiwar 1960s¹ and the alternative community groundswell of the 1970s. These various newcomers offset the decline of what we might call “ethnic” Friends in rural meetings through this period.

That magic balance of Quaker culture matching the zeitgeist of religious seekers disappeared somewhere back in the 1980s. We aren’t on forefront of any current spiritual trends. While there are bright spots and exceptions ², we’ve largely struggled with retaining newcomers in recent years. We’re losing our elders more quickly than we’re bringing in new people, hence the forty percent drop since the high water of 1987. The small 2017 uptick might be a good sign³ or it may be a statistical phantom.⁴ I’ll be curious to see what the next census brings.

2023 Update: I seem to have mixed up some numbers in my original 2018 post and have corrected them above.

I just came back from what was billed as a kind of hearing/information meeting on New Jersey Transit’s planned shutdown of the Atlantic City Line. At least two of us had taken this seriously enough that we had written 500-word statements (here’s mine) but as soon as I walked into the Atlantic City rail station this morning at 8am, I realized that this was just a pro-forma, disorganized PR appearance.

The chief executive of New Jersey Transit, Kevin Corbett ⁵, was there telling us the same list of excuses for the shutdown they’ve been telling us, namely, that this is about Positive Train Control (PTC) testing ⁶. At least I think he was. NJT apparently doesn’t believe in microphones. I squeezed as closely as I could in the amorphous crowd of maybe 100 passengers who had turned up but I still could only make out a few words. Nearest Corbett were video cameras whose spotlights lit up his face. Maybe I can watch the news tonight and hear the meeting that I drove forty minutes to attend⁷.

I did hear repeated invoking of “PTC” but no of those words were admissions or mea culpas about the long-simmering labor problems that have led to train crew shortages. Because NJ Transit’s management have been behind targets for training new crews, and because engineers have been leaving for better-paying jobs on Amtrak and Metro North, there aren’t enough crews to run all of its lines and also do PTC testing. The easiest fix to the labor shortage is to just shut down the least politically connected train line and redeploy its crews to NYC-bound trains. We’re told this is a temporary fix but what if the management problems hiring, training, and retaining crews continues to bottom out?

After half an hour of this, Transit police found portable line markers so that passengers could line up to talk to Corbett. There were many passengers I recognized from my 15 years of commuting this line and I stood trying to hear them but again, to no avail. It was clear he was just giving the line.

Nearby was a table with schedules. I was pretty unhappy but I asked them a specific question ⁸. At least the Transit employee said she didn’t know and would look into it. She even wrote “Farley” on a pad of paper. I guess my trip wasn’t totally wasted.

If you’re a South Jersey local affected by all this, there’s a petition to sign. My friend Joseph (bicycleriiights on Twitter) has also done a great job writing about the possibilities of visionary South Jersey transit reform. Update: Also, NoreasterNick did a much better job getting to the front of the line and challenging Corbett. His video is great.

Satire and irony, especially when it is subtle, done in character, or relies on tone can be misunderstood when taken literally. Friends can get so caught up in the words that we miss the point. It is never fun explaining a joke to a Friend, but even that interaction is part of the work of presenting performance art for Quakers. We are committed to fairness and love. Comedy can be used to hurt others or to make light of serious issues. Unpacking a joke can lead to rich discussion. I seek to use comedy to shed light on important issues. Still, some Friends prefer the straightforward message over the comic performance.

I really appreciate the care and honesty that Peterson has put into defining his work. It would be so easy for him to label his performance art as ministry and wear it as a cloak of respectability. Much of his work does indeed act as ministry and he uses a clearness committee as a Quaker discernment tool. But he wants to keep a space open for what you might call artistic confusion and so describes himself as a “theatrical performance activist.”

When the pendulum began trend toward re-embracing the ideas of ministry within Liberal Quakerism some years back, many forms of public work started being labeled ministry. It might be a sign of the incompleteness of our follow-through that few of the people coming forward with ministries felt comfortable calling themselves ministers. I like the idea of keeping middle-ground spaces that we don’t try to artificially kludge into classic Quaker models.

A Reluctant Minister

Reflections on performance art among Friends.

Friends Journal

There are also various schools who brand their sports teams with the Quaker name. But a Portland, Oregon, news station says that list is getting a bit smaller: Franklin High School ditching controversial ‘Quakers’ mascot

An assistant principal and another teacher told FOX 12 they shifted away from branding the school as “Quakers” several years ago. Several students also said they don’t know much about who Quakers are or the religion. Several seemed to think Benjamin Franklin, who the school is named after, was a Quaker. Franklin was not a Quaker. FOX 12 also spoke to Kelly McCurdy, who put three children through Franklin High. He said he believes the district is making a mistake and erasing tradition. “I think it’s silly, personally,” McCurdy said. “It’s not racially insensitive.”

It seems that the Fox affiliate went out of its way to find a cranky person to deplore a point no one was making. Of course it’s not racially insensitive. But these appropriated names are always… well, weird. No public school would call themselves The Jews or The Muslims or The Catholics or anything else smelling of religion. It’s a sign of how dismissed Friends are as a actual living religious movement and denomination that our nickname is considered fair game. We must turn to the local newspaper to get the real background:

Lisa Zuniga told the board that in 2014 she met Mia Pisano, a fellow Franklin High parent who is a member of the Quaker faith, and the pair started an effort to change the name. The name, they argued, violated the separation of church and state. The district, they said, should never commandeer a religious symbol or connotation for a mascot. Despite interest in the name change, Zuniga said, parents met stiff resistance from the district. It was hard to even get anyone to explain what the process would be to bring about a name change, she said.

https://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2018/05/portland_school_board_finds_qu.html

http://www.kptv.com/story/38145833/franklin-high-school-ditching-controversial-quakers-mascot

Probably not: there are many issues for which we only get submissions in the last week before deadline (or the week after deadline, which is not to be encouraged). But if you are thinking of writing, or have been meaning to encourage a friend with vision to send us something, then by all means sit down in front of a keyboard.

Also, the issue after that is non-themed. If you’ve ever had any questions for writing a general submission, let me know in the comments or direct message me. I’m writing something about that process this week.

Page not found — Friends Journal

Friends Journal

This year’s election feel different than previous years. People are ready to do something besides just voting. Many are running for office in record numbers, for example: Scientists and Women.Another population that is running in, perhaps, record numbers in 2018: Quakers!

He’s added a lot of interesting contextual links to articles about the new types of candidates we’re seeing in the 2018 election.

To make sure you get the latest information on the live panel, sign up for the live web panel’s Facebook event. And join us at 3pm ET for our live web panel. We’ll also be continuing to update the Friends Journal announcement page.

I’m in this funny position where I have a quarter century of random Quaker factoids in my head, have access to great databases (like instant searches of Friends Journal’s 60+ years of articles), and have good Googling chops. When I’m in a discussion with Friends face-to-face, I find I often have useful context. Some of it is historical (I geek out on the Quaker past) but some of it is just my lived memory. I’ve been in and out of Quaker offices for 27 years now. I’m entering this weird phase of life in which I’ve been a professional Quaker staffer longer than most of my contemporaries.

And ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this weird talent to remember things I read years earlier. When the topic of clearness committees recently came up, I remembered that Deborah Haines had written a piece about Rachel Davis DuBois in the long-defunct FGConnections newsletter (yes, groaner of a name but it was a great publication in its heyday). Thanks to Archive.org I could resurface the article and bring it to the discussions.

And so, I’ve been quietly been changing the idea of Quaker Ranter from a classic old-school blog to a daily email newsletter. I’ll still collect interesting Quaker links, as I’ve been doing for years with QuakerQuaker. But now I’ll annotate them and give them context. If there’s a side story I think is interesting I’ll tell it. I have a long train commute and writing fun and geeky things about Friends makes it interesting.

I think that something like this could help bring Quaker newcomers up to speed. Our insider language and unexplained (and sometimes dated) worldviews create an impediment for seekers. We kind of expect they’ll figure out things that aren’t so obvious. Learning factoids and histories a day at a time can give them some context to understand what’s happening Sunday morning. If that’s not enough, I also have an Ask A Quaker feature where people new to Friends can ask questions. I’ll be liberally pitching Friends Journal articles and QuakerSpeak videos because I think we’re doing some of our best Quaker media work, but I’m also all about spreading the love and will share many other great resources and blogs.

As with all my projects I also hope to get people contributing so it becomes a community watering hole. If you want to get involved, the first step is to sign up for the free daily email list. At some point, this will probably outgrow the free tier of the email service I’m using, and I will start to have to pay to send thesee emails out. For those of you with a little extra to give, Quaker Ranter Membership is a way to help offset these costs.

And let your friends know about it! Just send them to quakerranter.org/email to sign up.