snippet - Quaker Ranter

Check out KD’s defense of organized (Quaker) religion

Martin Kelley — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:31:31 +0000

It’s up on the sidebar and featured on QuakerQuaker, but I want to give an added boost to my friend Kevin-Douglas’ post “Why I bother with religion.” I’ve written about the Emergent Church / Quaker experiment that Kevin-Douglass is helping to organize down in Baltimore. Check out their new’ish website, http://www.setonhillfriends.org/
Here’s a snippet of today’s post:

Organized religion is based in community. Being in a community challenges me. Simply hanging out with my friends and engaging my family isn’t enough. The risks of such an intentional community and the support available therein offer so much more than if I just do what comes easily or go along with what exists around me. I’m challenged in community. I’m held accountable. And while it could be said that I could get this out of a gay rights group, or being part of an ethical society, the truth is that in a religious community, we all seek to go much deeper than the psychological or emotional levels. We seek to understand that Mystery — God. We seek to understand that transformative and healing power that comes from that Mystery.

Kevin-Douglas originally posted it to Facebook earlier today and I asked if he would sign up to QuakerQuaker and post it there. There’s a lot of great stuff that goes up on Facebook and it’s a useful tool for keeping in touch with friends, but most posts are not visible beyond your own Facebook friends list (it depends on your privacy settings). If you post something really good about Friends or belief on Facebook, seriously consider whether you might repost it somewhere more public. If you don’t have a blog handy, you can do what KD did and post it on QuakerQuaker, where every registered user has blogging capabilities (it creates a bit of a metaphysical connundrum for the QuakerQuaker editors, as it means we’ll be linking QQ posts to the QQ site, but that’s fine).

Friends and theology and geek pick-up hotspots

Martin Kelley — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:00:47 +0000

Wess Daniels posts about Quaker theology on his blog. I responded there but got to thinking of Swarthmore professor Jerry Frost’s 2000 Gathering talk about FGC Quakerism. Academic, theologically-minded Friends helped forge liberal Quakerism but their influenced wained after that first generation. Here’s a snippet:

“[T]he first generations of English and America Quaker liberals like Jones and Cadbury were all birthright and they wrote books as well as pamphlets. Before unification, PYM Orthodox and the other Orthodox meetings produced philosophers, theologians, and Bible scholars, but now the combined yearly meetings in FGC produce weighty Friends, social activists, and earnest seekers.”
…
“The liberals who created the FGC had a thirst for knowledge, for linking the best in religion with the best in science, for drawing upon both to make ethical judgments. Today by becoming anti-intellectual in religion when we are well-educated we have jettisoned the impulse that created FGC, reunited yearly meetings, redefined our role in wider society, and created the modern peace testimony. The kinds of energy we now devote to meditation techniques and inner spirituality needs to be spent on philosophy, science, and Christian religion.”

This talk was hugely influential to my wife Julie and myself. We had just met two days before and while I had developed an instant crush, Frost’s talk was the first time we sat next to one another. I realized that this might become something serious when we both laughed out loud at Jerry’s wry asides and theology jokes. We ended up walking around the campus late into the early hours talking talking talking.

But the talk wasn’t just the religion geek equivalent of a pick-up bar. We both responded to Frost’s call for a new generation of serious Quaker thinkers. Julie enrolled in a Religion PhD program, studying Quaker theology under Frost himself for a semester. I dove into historians like Thomas Hamm and modern thinkers like Lloyd Lee Wilson as a way to understand and articulate the implicit theology of “FGC Friends” and took independent initiatives to fill the gaps in FGC services, taking leadership in young adult program and co-leading workshops and interest groups.

Things didn’t turn out as we expected. I hesitate speaking for Julie but I think it’s fair enough to say that she came to the conclusion that Friends ideals and practices were unbridgable and she left Friends. I’ve documented my own setbacks and right now I’m pretty detached from formal Quaker bodies.

Maybe enough time hasn’t gone by yet. I’ve heard that the person sitting on Julie’s other side for that talk is now studying theology up in New England; another Friend who I suspect was nearby just started at Earlham School of Religion. I’ve called this the Lost Quaker Generation but at least some of its members have just been lying low. It’s hard to know whether any of these historically-informed Friends will ever help shape FGC popular culture in the way that Quaker academia influenced liberal Friends did before the 1970s.

Rereading Frost’s speech this afternoon it’s clear to see it as an important inspiration for QuakerQuaker. Parts of it act well as a good liberal Quaker vision for what the blogosphere has since taken to calling convergent Friends. I hope more people will stumble on Frost’s speech and be inspired, though I hope they will be careful not to tie this vision too closely with any existing institution and to remember the true source of that daily bread. Here’s a few more inspirational lines from Jerry:

We should remember that theology can provide a foundation for unity. We ought to be smart enough to realize that any formulation of what we believe or linking faith to modern thought is a secondary activity; to paraphrase Robert Barclay, words are description of the fountain and not the stream of living water. Those who created the FGC and reunited meetings knew the possibilities and dangers of theology, but they had a confidence that truth increased possibilities.

Creating an RSS feed from scratch

Martin Kelley — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 03:48:41 +0000

RSS feeds
are the lingua franca of the modern internet, the glue that binds
together the hundreds of services that make up “Web 2.0.” The term
stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and can be thought of as a
machine-code table of contents to a website. An RSS feed
for a blog will typically list the last dozen-or-so articles, with the
title, date, summary and content all laid out in special fields. Once
you have a website’s RSS feed you can syndicate, or re-publish, its contents by email, RSS reader
or as a sidebar on another website. This post will show you a
ridiculously easy way to “roll your own” RSS feed without having to
worry about your website’s content platform.

Just about every native Web 2.0 applications comes built-in with multiple RSS feeds.
But in the real world, websites are built using an almost-infinite
number of content management systems and web development software
programs. Sometimes a single website will use different programs for
putting its contents online and sometimes a single organization spreads
its functions over multiple domains.

Step 1: Make it Del.icio.us

To begin, sign up with Del.icio.us,
the popular “social bookmarking” web service (similar services can be
easily adapted to work). Then add a “post to Del.icio.us” button to
your browser’s toolbar following the instructions here.
Now whenever you put new content up on your site, go that new page,
click on your “post to Del.icio.us” button and fill out a good title
and description. Choose a tag to use. A tag is simply a category and
you can make it whatever you want but “mysites” or your business name
will be the easiest to remember. Hit save and you’ve started an RSS feed.

How? Well, Del.icio.us turns each tag into a RSS feed.
You can see it in all its machine code glory at
del.icio.us/rss/username/mysites (replacing “username” with your
username and “mysites” with whatever tag you chose).

Now you could just advertise that Del.icio.us RSS feed
to your audience but there are a few problems doing this. One is that
Del.icio.us accounts are usually personal. If your webmaster leaves,
then your published RSS feed will need to
change. Not a good scenario, especially since you won’t even be able to
tell who’s still using that old feed. Before you advertise your feed
you should “future proof” it by running it through Feedburner.

Cloak that Feed

Go to Feedburner.com. Right there on the homepage they invite you to type in a URL.
Enter your Del.icio.us feed’s address and sign up for a Feedburner
account. In the field next to feed address give it some sensible name
relating to your company or site, let’s say “mycompany” for our
example. You’ll now have a new RSS feed at
feeds.feedburner.com/mycompany. Now you’re in business: this is the
feed you advertise to the world. If you ever need to change the source RSS feed you can do that from within Feedburner and no one need know.

The default title of your Feedburner feed will still show it’s
Del.icio.us roots (and the webmaster’s username). To clear that out, go
into Feedburner’s “Optimize” tab and turn on the “Title/Description
Burner,” filling it out with a title and description that better
matches your feed’s purpose. For an example of all this in action, the
Del.icio.us feed that powers my tech link blog and its Feedburner “cloak” can be found here:

Get that Feed out there

Under Feedburner’s “Publicize” tag there are lots of neat features
to republish your feed yourself. First off is the “Chicklet chooser”
which will give you that ubiquitous RSS feed
icon to let visitors know you’ve entered the 21st Century. Their “Buzz
Boost” feature lets you create a snippet of code for your homepage that
will list the latest additions. “Email subscriptions” lets your
audience sign up for automatic emails whenever you add something to
your site.

Final Thoughts

RSS feeds are great ways of communicating
exciting news to your audiences. If you’re lucky, important bloggers in
your audience will subscribe to your feed and spread your news to their
networks. Creating a feed through a bookmarking service allows you to
add any page on any site regardless of its underlying structure.

A Military Draft Would be Good for Us

Martin Kelley — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 19:12:50 +0000

From Johann Christoph Arnold, a “provocative argument that a military draft might not be a bad idea”:www.nonviolence.org/articles/1003-arnold.php. “Deciding which side to stand on is one of life’s most vital skills. It forces you to test your own convictions, to assess your personal integrity and your character as an individual.”
It’s a pretty drastic wish. I don’t really wish it on today’s youngins’ (I’m not sure Arnold is quite convinced either). But I will give a snippet of my own personal story, since it’s kind of appropriate to the issue: when I was a senior in high school my father desperately wanted me to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. I went on interviews and even took the first physical. The pressure to join was sort of akin to the pressure young people of earlier generations have faced with a military draft (except more personal, as I was essentially living with the chair of the draft Martin Kelley board). I was forced to really think hard about what I believed. I had to reconcile my romaticism about the navy with my gut instincts that fighting was never a real solution. My father’s pressure made me realize I was a pacifist. With my decision to forego the Naval Academy made, I started asking myself what other ramifications followed from my peace stance. Almost twenty years, here’s Nonviolence.org.
Arnold’s argument, right or wrong, does reflect my story:
bq. A draft would present every young person with a choice between two paths, both of which require courage: either to heed the call of military duty and be rushed off to war, or to say, “No, I will give my life in the service of peace.”

William Gibson: the future will find you out

Martin Kelley — Sat, 28 Jun 2003 11:50:47 +0000

An interesting article on George Orwell and the future we’ve become. What would Orwell have thought about the big brother of national security and the never-ending war on terror. And what would he have thought of the internet and blogs? Here’s a snippet:

“In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out.