The talks was on “Quakers and the Prophetic Tradition”:
When Quakers talk about the prophetic tradition, we tend to go back to early Friends, but I am going to go back to Jeremiah.
https://www.ashleymwilcox.com/blog/2019/4/14/quakers-and-the-prophetic-tradition
From thr Guilfordian:
Wilcox began the discussion with a question of whether or not the Guilford community should seek out prophets and prophecies. Wilcox sought to relate this question to the Quaker tradition.
“This talk is about prophets and prophecy,” Wilcox said. “So the first question is, ‘What does it mean to be a prophet?’ I don’t think Jeremiah would recommend it.”
https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.guilfordian.com/news/2019/04/12/wilcox-talks-quakerism-and-the-prophetic-tradition/&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjk1NzUwOWM3NjZmNTA4MzU6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AFQjCNGr3hjx9Dxd8r_5amP0l6AQfRXDcg
From Isaac Smith:
I have tended to describe this shift in understanding as the moment when Quakerism “clicked” for me — when it ceased to be just the weird subculture I grew up in, and more a matter of conviction. Practices that I ignored or never quite understood, like making group decisions without taking a vote, now made sense, because they were borne out of an attempt to make Christ the present teacher in all affairs.
Isaac’s piece stems in part from the December Friends Journal, on Quakers and Christianity. A large percentage of the submissions we received for the issue had remarkably similar personal stories: people had grown up in a restrictive religious tradition and come to Liberal Friends because of its openness to spiritual seeking. If anything they were hostile to Christianity and distinctive Quaker peculiarities when they joined but over time they slowly shifted, often after getting to know grounded elder Friends. Now they quietly identified as Christian Friends.
We could have printed a whole issue of (mostly) convinced Liberal Friends who had rediscovered Christianity. Instead we picked a representative sample for the print edition and published the rest as part of our our extended online edition; you can read it all at the online contents. Although Isaac’s story is different (he grew up as a Friend) it shares a similar trajectory.
(Issac also has some questions about Quaker publishing, with a link to a great 2009 blog post from Johan Maurer. I feel I should talk about this issue too but that’ll take a bit more pondering on my part).
From Transition Quaker:
The Quaker way offers us a key to recognising what is authentic within any religious tradition, including Christianity, and distinguishing it from the distortions of power, privilege, literalism and dogmatism that tend to corrupt every human enterprise. Whatever stories and images display the guiding power of the Inward Light, in any tradition, can help to reveal the life of the Spirit and encourage us to encounter it for ourselves.
transitionquaker.blogspot.comA cynic might file this under “hope springs eternal”:
A phrase that keeps coming to mind is “a new Quakerism,” and oddly enough, I’ve been hearing other Friends unknowingly echo this phrase back to me. It seems to me that many Friends, even those who consider themselves “convinced,” are hungry for more than what the Society has to offer.
Of course it’s part of our tradition that it needs to be forever reborn. You can’t recycle sermons or use the prop of your university learning as a crutch. We are never to know what might happen when worship starts, since the idea is that it’s directly led in the moment by Christ. It’s also a part of our tradition that forms are forever calcifying and that we need to remember why we’re here and who’s brought us together. Glad to see the work continue.
Talk of “holy possessions” might also lead Quakers to think of those things which have set us apart from the rest of Christianity and may well preserve our tradition in the 21st century.
On the list of religious problems, the use of “Quaker” by non-Friends is more mystery than problem. There’s the multinational giant Quaker Oats Company of course, periodically making tone deaf statement with its name. Friends of a certain age might remember 1989’s rebranded Popeye the Quaker Man and every eighteen months the laugh-out-loud Quaker Oats threatens to sue us story goes re-viral on Facebook (the page is undated and so always feels new; the incident is at least 15 years old).
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
Yesterday I mentioned an interesting conversation with Chad Stephenson years ago about his theory/metaphor that Convergent Friends were like New Jazz traditionalists. His piece had only been published in the Spirit Rising anthology but Chad saw my post and has graciously put it up on his blog!
Throughout Quaker faith, divergence from its roots has brought newer, modern audiences to Quakers and progressed with new pathways while abandoning the shared past commonalities. Yet as a splintered tradition, Quakers have begun to suffer each other as distant relatives do when dining during the holidays; a failing coordination of growth which has led instead to disunity and a lack of understanding and respect for common roots essential to creating a mutually enhancing ecosystem of faith grounded in the Light.