If you look back through Friends Journal archives, you’ll find warnings against competitive behavior. In 1955 Bess B. Lane of Swarthmore (Pa.) Meeting wrote that schools should “Place emphasis on cooperation, sharing, rather than on competition” and wondered if “competition is being overstressed in our schools.” In 1972, Christopher H. Anderson, then a senior at Wilmington College, had stronger words. He contrasted his Quaker education with public schools, which he said “breed a social conformity, an intellectual blandness and a repugnant spirit of competition.”

If you know anyone who is interested in the topic, please forward this along!

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Friends Journal

There is a long history of Friends preaching and witnessing outside of the confines of the meetinghouse. George Fox’s Journal is full of unconventional worshiping; he had a particular penchant for preaching from any bit of high ground he could find, like a tree or rock outcropping. His contemporary James Naylor is most remembered for re‐enacting Jesus’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem by dramatically riding a horse down a main road into Bristol. Modern‐day Friends continue to find unconventional places to worship…

Also, I’ve just set up a form to get on the email notification list to get pinged when topic write-ups get posted. It’s very low-volume, as we only write these once a month. There’s only two subscribers. For the time being, I’m just keeping the emails in a list and sending personalized emails.

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Friends Journal

Before 2012, the mix had been flipped for years: two annual special issues, with the rest a catch-all from the incoming submission slush pile. I feel that more frequent themes have helped us steer clear of the rut of repeating the same articles on a too-frequent basis. We’re also seeing more articles consciously written for us (as opposed to be shopped around to various progressive publications). Most importantly from an editorial perspective, the process  also forces us to reach out to people, directly and on social media, to encourage them to write. One of my never-ending, never- reachable goals, is to always be encouraging new voices in the magazine. This is one tool to help get there.

We’ve already started getting feedback from individuals that their favorite cause isn’t covered in this latest list. I’m okay with that. We don’t cover everything every round. Core concerns of Friends get covered on a regular basis in the non-themed issues. Some authors are also really creative in finding a hook to bring their cause into seemingly unrelated topic. Also, I think we’ve covered all of the major topics in the last seven years—sometimes multiple times—and those articles are still be read and shared and commented on.

Many of these themes come from reader suggestions. Others come from more random conversations we have. One of my favorite this time is the issue on Gambling. That was inspired one late-January 2018 morning when a new Friend called in to ask us if we had any articles on the topic. Apparently, she had been chastised at meeting that weekend for suggesting there should be a prize for whoever guessed the correct number of valentine candy hearts in a jar. She wanted to understand the Quaker testimonies. Much to my surprise there hadn’t been much in recent Friends Journal articles. I randomly asked on Facebook whether we had “essentially dropped” our testimony on gambling. The resultant Facebook thread quickly made it obvious that Friends have an issue-worthy amount of feelings on the topic.

Have fun looking over the list. If you have suggestions, let me know (I will write them down and remember). If you want to encourage people to write, please please do. Also, send me a message if you want to get on a monthly email list in which I promote an upcoming writing deadline. The next coming up in for March’s issue, Outside the Meetinghouse.

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Friends Journal

It’s a series of questions that has dogged Friends since we did away with clergy and started calling baptism a “sprinkling,” and it has been an issue of contention in every Quaker schism: Are we Christian? Are we really Christian? Does it matter if we’re Christian? What does it even mean to be Christian in the world?

One reason we began publishing more themed issues beginning in 2012 was so we use the topics to invite fresh voices to write for us. While we’ve long had regulars who will send us a few articles a year on miscellaneous topics, themes allow us to tempt people with specific interests and ministries: reconciliation from war, climate activism, workplace reform, mentorship, ecumenical relationships, the wider family of Friends, etc.

More recently I’ve started these “Editor’s Desk” posts as a way of sharing some of the ideas we have around particular upcoming issues. The post also gives us a URL that we can share on social media to drum up submissions. I also hope that others will share the URL via email.

The absolute best way of reaching new people is when someone we know shares an upcoming theme with someone we don’t know. There are many people who by chance or inclination seem to straddle Quaker worlds. They are invaluable in amplifying our calls for submissions. Question: would it help if we started an email list just for writers or for people who want to be reminded of upcoming themes so they can share them with Friends?

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Friends Journal

But a big gateway is genealogy. Over the years I’ve gotten countless emails and phone calls from excited newcomers who start off the conversation with details of their family tree (when I used to answer the Quakerbooks phone, I would let these folks go for about two minutes before gently interjecting “wow that’s fascinating!, do you wanna buy a book?!?”)

One fascinating factoid in this week’s QuakerSpeak video comes from Thomas Hamm:

If your family arrived in the United States before 1860, there’s probably a 50–50 chance that you have a Quaker ancestor somewhere.

Quaker Meetings shouldn’t try to be the gathering spots for prodigal family reunions. The early Quakers were strangers to one another, joining together because of the fire of their convictions. Ours is a living, breathing, ever evolving spiritual practice. Still: we are also a grouping of people. We look for belonging.

The longer I’m with Friends, the more I think ours is a religious community that draws strength from the tension of paradoxes. I have a soft spot for the old Quaker families. If Jesus brings some of the new people in through Beliefnet quizzes or Ancestry.com search results, well, maybe that’s okay.

http://quakerspeak.com/how-to-research-your-quaker-ancestry/

I use it all as a tool, for sure. But there are many ways in which we’re increasingly defined by corporations with no Quakers and no interest in us except for whatever engagement numbers they can generate. Look at the nonsense at many of the open Quaker Facebook groups as an obvious example. People with limited experience or knowledge and relatively fringe ideas can easily dominate discussion just by posting with a frequency that involved or careful Friends couldn’t match. Facebook doesn’t care if it’s a zoo as long as people come back to read the latest outrageous comment thread. Just because the topic is Quaker doesn’t mean the discourse really holds well to our values, historical or modern.

Add to this that Google and Facebook could make any of our Quaker-owned websites nearly invisible with a tweak of algorithms (this is not hypothetical: Facebook has dinged most publisher Pages over the years).

The open web has a lot of pluses. I’m glad to see a Friend among its prominent champions and I’d like to see Quaker readers seeking it out more (most easily by straying of Facebook and subscribing to blogs’ email lists). From Hardie:

Of course, there is an alternative to Facebook and other walled gardens: the open web. The alternative is the version of the Internet where you own your content and activity, have minimal dependence on third party business models, can discover new things outside of what for-profit algorithms show you, and where tools and services interact to enhance each other’s offerings, instead of to stamp each other out of existence.

https://chrishardie.com/2018/04/rebuilding-open-web/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

So it seems kind of amazing there’s an April issue of Friends Journal. But there is and it’s a good one I think: we look at healing. The cover of new tree leaves backlit by springtime sun is seasonal but it also reflects the topic and our mood after a wintry late winter.

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www.friendsjournal.org

I really see mental diversity as a gift to a community, and that the folks that I serve and that I’ve worked with are very resilient. If they tell you their stories about how they’ve gotten through their traumatic situations and what’s helped them to keep going, faith is a huge part of that. And we have a lot to learn from their strength and resilience.

My family has had very avoidable and out-of-nowhere conflicts at two religious spaces—one a Friends meeting and the other a Presbyterian church—over easy accomodations for my son Francis. It seems like many of the dynamics that we’ve seen are not dissimilar to those that keep others out of meeting communities. Who are we willing to adapt for? Is comfort and familiarity our main goal?

Melody also wrote for Friends Journal a few years ago, Imagining a Trauma-informed Quaker Community.