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.

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

ICT

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?

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…

www.friendsjournal.org

Most-commented articles on Friends Journal website of all time. February’s article on the vision of Quakerism by Don McCormick has been a surprise rocket to #2, but no one is likely to ever catch Su Penn’s piece from 2013.

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.

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.

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.

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?