Tag Archives ⇒ surprise

Be Ready to Answer the Phone

August 20, 2026
· Martin Kelley

Thoughts on the sur­prise Tru­itt fam­i­ly vis­it yes­ter­day, because I know Quak­ers can be real­ly real­ly bad at this… Make sure you have a web­site that lists a phone num­ber that rings through to a real per­son in real time. One that also lists an email that will be prompt­ly read and answered. This event came togeth­er pret­ty fast. From the first phone call from town­ship offi­cial Sta­cy Webb late Tues­day after­noon to my unlock­ing the meet­ing­house doors was about 24 hours.

I was on a video call when Stacy’s first call came in so I had to let it go to voice­mail. So also have voice­mail set up. After my pre­vi­ous call end­ed I was able to reply to Sta­cy’s email and then fol­lowup with a quick call to con­firm details. This was one less detail she had to wor­ry about in an event with lots of mov­ing parts. (In addi­tion to a half dozen Tru­itt fam­i­ly mem­bers we had the may­or, deputy may­or, town­ship man­ag­er, a police liai­son, and a com­mu­ni­ca­tions staffer with a cam­era. That’s a lot of peo­ple to coor­di­nate.) In a lull in the event, Sta­cy told me it was great that she find and reach some­one at Crop­well Meet­ing so easily.

I know com­mu­ni­ca­tion can be hard but we need to be acces­si­ble. I’ve been ghost­ed SO MANY TIMES when try­ing to call or email Quak­er meet­ings. And it’s not just the small ones that don’t get back to me. Some­times meet­ings with paid office staff also don’t return mes­sages. Crop­well uses a Google Voice num­ber to for­ward phone calls to my per­son­al cell and emails also auto­mat­i­cal­ly for­ward to me. It’s not over­whelm­ing, not in the least — I let things for­ward to voice­mail when I need to and I have ringers turned off at night. But because Crop­well set this up even before I became involved, I’ve been able to respond to inquiries quick­ly, once even as I was dri­ving to meet­ing on Sun­day morn­ing (don’t wor­ry, I pulled over). Peo­ple already think we’re extinct. Don’t give them more rea­sons to think that’s true.

The Peaceable Kingdom Lost

June 30, 2026
· Martin Kelley

A sto­ry by Charles Fox of just a few of the mas­sacres of Indige­nous peo­ple in Penn­syl­va­nia in the late 1700s. While the Friends and Mora­vians often har­bored endan­gered Susque­han­nock, their paci­fism meant they were large­ly unable to stop the maraud­ing Scots-Irish who were doing the killing.

As one his­to­ri­an wrote:

The fron­tier did col­lapse in late 1763. The sur­prise was that the armed mob that descend­ed from the fron­tier into Lan­cast­er — and then to Philadel­phia in 1764 — were White fron­tiers­men. Every­body had expect­ed it would be Indians.

Even more trag­i­cal­ly, a few of the peo­ple who escaped the mobs end­ed up being slaugh­tered in lat­er attacks. Much of the colo­nial gov­ern­ment was­n’t Quak­er in the lat­ter half of the cen­tu­ry, includ­ing some of William Pen­n’s descen­dants. Still, Friends today can won­der whether the high-minded promis­es of eter­nal friend­ship between Quak­ers and Indige­nous Peo­ples were more hol­low and aspi­ra­tional than we’d like to admit. (Of course most of the Lenape and Susque­han­nock died from European-imported dis­eases, with every boat­load of set­tlers bring­ing more death to the orig­i­nal inhabitants.)

The ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ Lost: A Friendship Found  - ICT
The ‘Peace­able King­dom’ Lost: A Friend­ship Found  — ICT 

The Con­esto­ga mas­sacres in Penn­syl­va­nia more than 250 years ago for­ev­er changed Native-White relations

ICT ICT 

Cesar Chavez and me

March 19, 2026
· Martin Kelley

Wow, so stunned to read the reports of Cesar Chavez abus­ing young girls and rap­ing Unit­ed Farm Work­er VP Dolores Huer­ta.

In the mid-80s I was one of the many ide­al­is­tic col­lege kids who interned with the UFW for a sum­mer. I got to hang out with him a num­ber of times. His son-in-law ran the NYC-based media cam­paign and Cesar would come for plan­ning meet­ings but also to vis­it his daugh­ter and grand­kids. She made great cheese enchi­ladas and all of us would talk late into the night as he told stories.

I do remem­ber think­ing — and ask­ing — why the saint­ed VP Dolores Huer­ta nev­er actu­al­ly seemed all that involved, at least not to the point of ever com­ing East that sum­mer to par­tic­i­pate in NYC-based media strat­e­gy meet­ings. It was explained she was need­ed back in Cal­i­for­nia.1 I nev­er met her. I remem­ber not being sur­prised at all that she did­n’t ascend to the UFW pres­i­den­cy when Cesar died. It went instead to the son-in-law who had led our office.

My direct super­vi­sor was a schlub and sex­ist pig. He was always mak­ing inap­pro­pri­ate­ly sug­ges­tive com­ments to the young female interns, which they uni­ver­sal­ly laughed off. They were all smart, con­fi­dent women with futures who weren’t going to be put off by him. I was the only male intern that sum­mer and he put me in shit­ty assign­ments, pres­sur­ing me to drop out. I assume I was seen as com­pe­ti­tion and indeed I did start dat­ing a fel­low intern (the only rea­son I put up with his behav­ior and made it through the sum­mer). I see he’s still with the UFW, now list­ed as first vice pres­i­dent, which is not at all inspiring.

It was per­haps the most dys­func­tion­al office cul­ture I’ve ever seen. The union’s influ­ence had obvi­ous­ly declined since the heady days of RFK march­ing with Cesar in huge ral­lies. They seemed to jump from fad to fad hop­ing to recap­ture atten­tion. That year direct mar­ket­ing was all the rage in busi­ness cir­cles and the UFW was jump­ing in with both feet. We would spend hours in meet­ings set­ting unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions, then break our own guide­lines to “meet” them. I’d be called out for try­ing to do things the way we had agreed. I remem­ber won­der­ing if any of the office work I did that sum­mer actu­al­ly made a jot of dif­fer­ence. Help­ing to orga­nize East Coast appear­ances of Cesar was def­i­nite­ly the high­light of the sum­mer — well, that and the girl­friend and get­ting to hang out in New York City all the time.

I do have to won­der now if some of the dys­func­tion and sex­ism in the office was ulti­mate­ly relat­ed to Cesar’s repeat­ed molesta­tion of chil­dren.2 Did he fos­ter a cul­ture in which we laughed off bad behav­ior and did­n’t ques­tion poor management?

NYTimes inves­ti­ga­tion

September Friends Journal

September 4, 2025
· Martin Kelley

The Sep­tem­ber issue of Friends Jour­nal is out. There are a lot of sto­ries about how we get through trou­bled times. From my open­ing col­umn:

One of the roles of faith is to remem­ber that we’ve been here before. We’ve been the wan­der­ing Jews lost in the desert but fed man­na to sur­vive. We remem­ber the dis­ci­ples tak­en by sur­prise by the rush of Roman guards come to arrest our Mes­si­ah, who urged us to put away our swords. We tell sto­ries of a young George Fox wan­der­ing Eng­land look­ing for spir­i­tu­al teach­ers until all his “hopes in them and in all men were gone.” We sur­vive by telling sto­ries. We keep our­selves cen­tered and calm by remem­ber­ing oth­ers who found a path through uncer­tain­ty and assured us they were held up by a Comforter.

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

Recovering the past through photos

June 1, 2015
· Martin Kelley

2015 looks like it’s shap­ing up to be the year that online cloud pho­to ser­vices all take a giant leapt for­ward. Just in the last few months alone, I’ve gone and dug up my ten-plus year pho­to archive from a rarely accessed back­up dri­ve (some 72 GB of files) and uploaded it to three dif­fer­ent pho­to services.

First it was Drop­box, whose Carousel app promised to change every­thing. For $10/month, I can have all of the dig­i­tized pho­tos I’ve ever tak­en all togeth­er. It changed how I access past events. Back in the day I might have tak­en 20 pic­tures and post­ed 2 to Flickr. The oth­er 18 were for all intents inac­ces­si­ble to me — on the back­up dri­ve that sits in a dusty draw­er in my desk. Now I could look up some event on my pub­lic Flickr, remem­ber the date, then head to Dropbox/Carousel to look through every­thing I took that day — all on my phone. Some­times I’d even share the whole roll from that event to folks who were there.

But this was a two-step process. Flickr itself had boost­ed its stor­age space last year but it wasn’t until recent­ly that they revealed a new Cam­era Roll and uploader that made this all work more seam­less­ly. So all my pho­tos again went up there. Now I didn’t have to jug­gle between two apps.

Last week, Google final­ly (final­ly!) broke its pho­tos from Google+ and the rem­nants of Picasa to give them their own home. It’s even more fab­u­lous than Flickr and Drop­box, in that its search is so good as to feel like mag­ic. Peo­ple, places, and image sub­jects all can be accessed with the search speed that Google is known for. And this ser­vice is free and uploads old videos.

Theo (identified by his baby nickname, "Skoochie") in a backpack as we scout for Christmas trees, December 2003.
Screen­shot of Theo (iden­ti­fied by his baby nick­name, “Skoochie”) and Julie, Decem­ber 2003.

I’m con­stant­ly sur­prised how just how emo­tion­al­ly pow­er­ful an old pho­to or video can be (I waxed lyri­cal­ly about this in Nos­tal­gia Comes Ear­ly, writ­ten just before our last fam­i­ly vaca­tion). This week­end I found a short clip from 2003 of my wife car­ry­ing our new­born in a back­pack and cit­ing how many times he had wok­en us up the night before. At the end she joked that she could guilt trip him in years to come by show­ing this video to him. Now the clip is some­thing I can find, load, and play in a few sec­onds right from my ever-present phone.

So what I’ve noticed is this quick access to unshared pho­tos is chang­ing the nature of my cell­phone photo-taking. I’m tak­ing pic­tures that I nev­er intend to share but that give me an estab­lish­ing shot for a par­tic­u­lar event: signs, dri­ve­way entrances, maps. Now that I have unlim­it­ed stor­age and a cam­era always with­in reach, I can use it as a quick log of even the most quo­tid­i­an life events (MG Siegler recent­ly wrote about The Pow­er of the Screen­shot, which is anoth­er way that quick and ubiq­ui­tous pho­to access is chang­ing how and what we save.) With GPS coor­di­nates and pre­cise times, it’s espe­cial­ly use­ful. But the most pro­found effect is not the activ­i­ty log­ging, but still the emo­tions release unlock­ing all-but-lost mem­o­ries: remem­ber­ing long-ago day trips and vis­its with old friends.

Sexual assaults on campus then and now

August 4, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Back in the late 1980s when I was a Vil­lano­va Uni­ver­si­ty under­grad, sex­u­al assault did­n’t hap­pen. True story.

It will sur­prise no one to learn that I co-edited an alter­na­tive, “under­ground” week­ly junior and senior year. We called it the VACUUM, a name whose acronym changed every issue. Read­ing about an ear­ly “date rape” study in my fem­i­nist stud­ies class I extrap­o­lat­ed how many rapes should rea­son­ably be expect­ed to occur on a cam­pus of Vil­lanova’s size. I added a few anec­dotes from my all-male dorm expe­ri­ence and pub­lished it in the VACUUM. A short while lat­er some friends of mine who edit­ed the offi­cial stu­dent paper picked up the sto­ry and even cit­ed an anony­mous quo­ta­tion from me in what is prob­a­bly the only offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion of the VAC­U­UM’s exis­tence in the V.U. archives.

Right around this time a female stu­dent brought her alle­ga­tions of an on-campus sex­u­al assault to the local police. Cam­pus offi­cials feigned sur­prise and pro­vid­ed the local media with par­rot­ed quotes: “In all my xyz years work­ing here I have nev­er ever heard of an alle­ga­tion of rape.” Chief of Secu­ri­ty, Dean of Stu­dents, etc., all deliv­ered the same line, clear­ly coached by a pub­lic rela­tions team, with only the years changed to reflect their cam­pus tenure. Thou­sands of stu­dents, dozens of years, hun­dreds of frat par­ties, tanker-fulls of cheap beer and not a hint of impropriety.
Last night I chanced on my alma mater’s web­site and saw a link right there on the home­page to an arti­cle mys­te­ri­ous titled Recent Cam­pus Inci­dent (gener­ic URL, prob­a­bly designed to dis­ap­pear soon). It doc­u­ment­ed an alleged assault on a female stu­dent by three mem­bers of the foot­ball team last month. The announce­ment reports that the Uni­ver­si­ty found them in vio­la­tion of the cam­pus’s Code of Con­duct and “rescind­ed the admis­sion of the three young men.”

A Google News search turns up that this has been exten­sive­ly cov­ered by the media with almost 500 hits. The Del­co Times reports that the 1990 Clery Act and its amend­ments have made uni­ver­si­ty cover-ups ille­gal and required reports and spe­cif­ic pro­to­cols for respond­ing to cam­pus crimes. The cur­rent media spot­light and long-standing fed­er­al laws cer­tain­ly account for much of Vil­lanova’s 2007 enlight­en­ment. What­ev­er the source of change, it’s nice to see. Even three play­ers from the beloved foot­ball team can get the boot (sor­ry, have their admis­sions rescind­ed) for crim­i­nal behav­ior. Bet­ter still, the uni­ver­si­ty can fess up to the crime and take some respon­si­bil­i­ty. The times, they have a’ changed.

“Conservative Liberal Quakers” and not becoming a least-common-denominator, sentimental faith

July 13, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Over on beppe­blog, occas­sion­al QR com­menter Joe Gua­da talks about start­ing a Bible study group in his Friends meet­ing. It’s a great post, which real­ly pulls togeth­er some of the issues of those of us try­ing to be both con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­al in our Quakerism.

None of their con­cerns were a sur­prise to me; I’ve had many of the same myself. What did sur­prise me was how long it took mem­bers to final­ly approach me with their “con­cerns” (a Friend­ly euphemism for being in com­plete dis­agree­ment with anoth­er). They seemed to be tak­ing the Bible too literally…

I doubt that I changed any minds dur­ing our lengthy, but respect­ful con­ver­sa­tion. But, unlike what seems like the opin­ion of the major­i­ty of lib­er­al Friends, where per­son­al and cor­po­rate rev­e­la­tion is the sole arbiter of faith, I believe that indi­vid­u­als and groups need far more than that to keep us from dete­ri­o­rat­ing into a “least-common-denominator”, sen­ti­men­tal faith that tries to be all things to (most) every­body (as long as they agree with our pol­i­tics). I believe that Friends have a rich his­to­ry to draw from, which includes our present Faith & Prac­tice (along with past F&P’s), the writ­ings and tes­ti­mo­ny of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions, and (hold your breath) the Bible.

This past week I’ve been won­der­ing whether the best descrip­tion of my spir­i­tu­al state is a “con­ser­v­a­tive lib­er­al Friend,” i.e., some­one in the “lib­er­al” branch of Friends who holds “con­ser­v­a­tive” val­ues (I mean these terms in their the­o­log­i­cal sense, as descrip­tive terms that refer to well-defined his­tor­i­cal move­ments). I feel a kin­ship with Joe and with some of the peo­ple I met this year at the FGC Gath­er­ing. There is a small-scale “con­ser­v­a­tive lib­er­al” move­ment going on and it seems like we should fig­ure out a name for ourselves.

Back in the 1970s and 80s there was a group dubbed “neo­con­ser­v­a­tive Quak­ers,” lib­er­al Friends who moved to con­ser­v­a­tive year­ly meet­ings (espe­cial­ly Ohio) and out­did the home­grown con­ser­v­a­tives, adopt­ing plain dress and gain­ing a rep­u­ta­tion for being stick­lers on con­ser­v­a­tive the­ol­o­gy and practice.

But although I’ve picked up plain dress, I’m not a 1970s “neo­con­ser­v­a­tive” Friend. First off, I’m not mov­ing to Ohio (it’s a love­ly state I’m sure, but roots trump ide­ol­o­gy for me any day of the week). I’m not even seri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing leav­ing Lib­er­al Quak­erism. For all the some­times muddied-thinking, I’m proud of our branch. I’m proud that we’ve said yes to gay and les­bian Friends and I see it as our pos­i­tive come­up­pance that so much of our reli­gious lead­er­ship now comes from the FLGBTQC com­mu­ni­ty (so many of whose mem­bers are sol­id Chris­tians dri­ven out of oth­er denom­i­na­tions). I see us as one of the most dynam­ic, forward-thinking branch of Friends. Besides, lib­er­al Quak­erism is my home. I’ve been giv­en enough hints that I think my min­istry is here too. Not that I’m not grate­ful for all the branch­es of Quak­erism. I am graced with new Friends met through this blog from all the branch­es of Amer­i­can Quak­erism and I’ve found that there are those seek­ing out to reclaim Quak­erism in each of them. I have broth­ers and sis­ters through­out Quak­er­dom, blessed be! But my role, my home, and my min­istry is to be a Conservative-leaning voice among Lib­er­al Friends. And it’s becom­ing increas­ing­ly clear that I’m not alone. Some­thing is afoot in lib­er­al Quakerism.

So what might we call our­selves? Is “con­ser­v­a­tive lib­er­al Friends” a use­ful term?