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!

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

This year’s election feel different than previous years. People are ready to do something besides just voting. Many are running for office in record numbers, for example: Scientists and Women.Another population that is running in, perhaps, record numbers in 2018: Quakers!

He’s added a lot of interesting contextual links to articles about the new types of candidates we’re seeing in the 2018 election.

To make sure you get the latest information on the live panel, sign up for the live web panel’s Facebook event. And join us at 3pm ET for our live web panel. We’ll also be continuing to update the Friends Journal announcement page.

This guy in Streetview is standing near the spot where the world’s first #selfie portrait was taken in 1839.

Robert Cornelius was one of the first people to try to reproduce Louis Daguerre’s photographic technique after news of the breakthrough reach Philadelphia. A chemist working at his family’s gas lighting company, Cornelius started experimenting with different chemical combinations until he found a way to reduce exposure times so that a person to sit still long enough for a portrait. In October 1839 he took a picture himself “in the yard back of his store and residence, (old) 176 Chestnut Street, above Seventh (now number 710), in Philadelphia,” according to an oral history published half a century later (PDF). Cornelius recounts:

It was our business to make a great variety of articles of plated metal. Very soon afterwards, I made in the factory a tin box, and bought from McAllister, 48 Chestnut Street, a lens about two inches in diameter, such as was used for opera purposes. With these instruments I made the first likeness of myself and another one of some of my children, in the open yard of my dwelling, sunlight bright upon us, and I am fully of the impression that I was the first to obtain a likeness of the human face.

Remarkably, in 2014, the Cornelius and Co. building is still there on Chestnut Street, though barely recognizable, with an extra floor on top and extensive facade changes. It’s a discount drug store. The back is the narrow alley named Ionic Street, home to dumpsters and people wanting to stay out of sight. The yard is to the right of these dumpsters. With #selfie such a popular hashtag, Cornelius’s picture has circulated on a lot of internet lists as the “world’s first selfie.” But it’s historical significance is far greater: it is the first photographic portrait of our species. I’m not typically one for hyperbole, but we humans started seeing ourselves differently after that portrait.

I originally assumed the building on the right of the alley stood where the yard had been but a satellites turns up a surprise: the yard is still there! Looking at the 710 property from above, the buildings facing Chestnut and Ionic are separate–with a large open space in between! There are two sections that look almost to be garden beds.

Yo Philly, how has 710 Chestnut Street not been snatched up and turned into a museum of photographic history? The first floor could focus on nineteenth century Philadelphia innovation, with the still-existent inner courtyard turned into a tourist destination? It would be like catnip. What self-respecting modern tourist wouldn’t walk the few blocks from Independence Hall to take their picture at the very site of the world’s first selfie? I know Philly typically doesn’t respect any history past 1776 but come on!

Update March 2021: Katie Park in the Inquirer reporting an all-too-predictable story: Philly L&I approves demolition of Chestnut Street properties that preservationists had tried to protect. It’s not Cornelius’s house at 710 but it’s just a few doors down the block at 730–732. The article has some great info from Justin Brooks, a lawyer who’s been trying to organize historic recognition for the 600, 700, and 800 blocks of Chestnut. One tidbit: in 1891 Chestnut Street was widened by the city, requiring “building owners to tear down their own facades to move farther back.” (You could write a tome on Philly history that’s been lost to road widening projects but at least this was “just” the 700 block facades.)

At year’s end it’s always interesting to look back and see which articles got the most visits. Here are the top-five QuakerRanter.org blog posts of 2013.

1. Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning

This grew out of a interesting little tweet about search engine optimization that got me thinking about how Friends Meetings can retain the curious one-time visitors.

2. Tom Heiland

My father-in-law died in January. These are few pictures I put together while Julie was still at the family home with the close relatives. Thanks to our friends for sharing a bit of our life by reading this one. He’s missed.

3. Expanding Concepts of Pacifism

A look at Friends testimonies and the difficulties of being a fair-trade pacifist in our hyper-connected world today. I think George Fox and the early Friends were faced with similar challenges and that our guide can be the same as theirs.

4. Rethinking Blogs

A number of new services are trying to update the culture of blogging. This post looked at comments; a subsequent one considered how we might reorganize our blogs into more of a structured Wiki.

5. Iraq Ten Years Later: Some of Us Weren’t Wrong

This year saw a lot of hang wringing by mainstream journalists on the anniversary of the Iraq War. I didn’t have much patience and looked at how dissenting voices were regularly locked out of debate ten years ago–and are still locked out with the talk that “all of us” were wrong then.

I should give the caveat that these are the top-five most-read articles that were written this year. Many of the classics still outperform these. The most read continues to be my post on unpopular baby names (just today I overheard an expectant mother approvingly going through a list of over-trendy names; I wondered if I should send her the link). My post on how to order men’s plain clothing from Gohn’s Brothers continues to be popular, as does a report about a trip to a legendary water hole deep in the South Jersey pines.

Embedded Link

It’s official: South Sudan a new country
South Sudan took a seat at the world’s table early Saturday as citizens of the new country took to the streets to celebrate.

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Martin Kelley and I will be
leading a
weekend retreat at Pendle Hill in just a couple weeks (May 14–16)
and I’m starting to get really excited about it! Martin and I have been
collaborating a lot together over the past few months in preparation for
this weekend and I wanted to share a little more of what we have
planned for those of you who are interested in coming (or still on the
fence). During the weekend we will be encouraging conversations around
building communities, convergent Friends and how this looks in our local
meetings. I wanted to give the description of the weekend, some of the
queries we’ll be touching on, and the outline for the weekend. And of
course, I want to invite all of you interested parties to join us!

Read the full post on Wess’s blog

It’s next Thursday, the 19th at 7:30pm in Hammonton. If you want to join but don’t have my address just send me an email and I’ll provide details. There’s also a Facebook event listing for this. If enough people are interested we can have more occasional Conservative/Convergent/Emergent Quakerly worship in this part of South Jersey! If you can’t make it but are intrigued by the idea, let me know and I’ll keep you in the loop.

UPDATE: The worship went well, about half a dozen people showed up. If you want to be alerted to any follow-up worship opportunities in the Hammonton area send me an email and I’ll add you to my list.

I won’t belabor the point, but I wonder if something similar is happening within Friends. It’s kind of weird that only two people have commented on Johan Maurer’s blog post about Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s report on Friends United Meeting. Johan’s post may well be the only place where online discussion about this particular report is available. I gave a plug for it and it was the most popular link from QuakerQuaker, so I know people are seeing it. The larger issue is dealt with elsewhere (Bill Samuel has a particularly useful resource page) but Johan’s piece seems to be getting a big yawn.

It’s been superseded as the most popular QuakerQuaker link by a lighthearted call for an International Talk Like a Quaker Day put up by a Livejournal blogger. It’s fun but it’s about as serious as you might expect. It’s getting picked up on a number of blogs, has more links than Johan’s piece and at current count has thirteen commenters. I think it’s a great way to poke a little fun of ourselves and think about outreach and I’m happy to link to it but I have to think there’s a lesson in its popularity vis-a-vis Johan’s post.

Here’s the inevitable question: do most Quakers just not care about Friends United Meeting or Baltimore Yearly Meeting, about a modern day culture clash that is but a few degrees from boiling over into full-scale institutional schism? For all my bravado I’m as much an institutional Quaker as anyone else. I care about our denominational politics but do others, and do they really?

Yearly meeting sessions and more entertainment-focused Quaker gatherings are lucky if they get three to five percent attendance. The governing body of my yearly meeting is made up of about one percent of its membership; add a percent or two or three and you have how many people actually pay any kind of attention to it or to yearly meeting politics. A few years ago a Quaker publisher commissioned a prominent Friend to write an update to liberal Friends’ most widely read introductory book and she mangled the whole thing (down to a totally made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after publication–even insiders don’t care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most contemporary Friends post-institutional? The percentage of Friends involved in the work of our religious bodies has perhaps always been small, but the divide seems more striking now that the internet is providing competition. The big Quaker institutions skate on being recognized as official bodies but if their participation rate is low, their recognition factor small, and their ability to influence the Quaker culture therefore minimal, then are they really so important? After six years of marriage I can hear my wife’s question as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the religious authority of these bodies come from? As someone who sees the world through a sociological/historical perspective, my question is complementary but somewhat different: if so few people care, then is there authority? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when
a schism might mean the loss of control over a beloved school or campground–factor out
the sentimental factor and what’s left?

I don’t think a diminishing influence is a positive trend, but it won’t go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in committees). How are today’s generation of Friends going to deal with changing cultural forces that are threatening to undermine our current practices? And how might we use the new opportunities to advance the Quaker message and Christ’s agenda?