Back in 2010 he told the Philadelphia Inquirer he and his wife were regular meeting attenders living “Quaker values” but when Friends Journal reached out to him a few years ago it sounded like he no longer identified as a Friend.

John Hickenlooper Says He Is Running in 2020, Citing a ‘Crisis of Division’ (Published 2019)

The former Colorado governor joins a crowded Democratic field. Even in his home state, there is skepticism that…

www.nytimes.com

Who tells our story in this time?  In today’s world of immediate news, and social media, and everyone having a twitter account and an opinion – there’s a lot of misinformation out there.  Some of it might be damaging and outright manipulative.  Some of it might just be misinformed people, who are confusing Quakers (for example) with Amish folks, or Shakers.

One of the reasons I’ve been so involved in Quaker media is my longtime concern that we’re in increasing danger of being defined by outsiders. A mainstream site with a page on Quakers can easily show up higher in search results than pages we create.  For a long time back in the day, an entry on Quakers written by some Unitarians on Religioustolerance.com was a top hit. Google and Facebook have long had more say in defining Quaker beliefs than any of our national organizations. Even when real-life Quakers are involved— in Facebook groups, Wikipedia editing, blogging, and the original Quaker.org—there was none of the kind of formal Quaker process (for better and worse) that historically characterized Quaker publishing.

One happy irony is that Kathleen herself came in through a channel with no Quaker involvement. She writes: ” I had never heard of Quakers until I took an internet quiz in my mid- thirties.” This is almost certainly the “Belief-o-Matic” Beliefnet quiz (confirmed in comments). The site was founded as a venture-capital-fueled  attempt to win the advertising religion market in the heady years of what we retrospectively call the dot-com bubble. The original quiz dates further back to a still-going site called SelectSmart, which hosts dozens of quizzes (“Which Bond Villain Are You?,” “What Pizza Topping Are You?,” “Pink Floyd Album Selector”), one of the most popular of which is “Belief System Selector.” The site is Curt and Lori Anderson, a husband-and-wife team; he was the techie who programmed the quizzes; she hunted for content. She used online sources and her local library to coming up with questions for him to plug in for the belief quiz (read some of the story here and also here). Beliefnet started hosting it independently, giving it a UI refresh and renaming it Belief-o-Matic. For whatever reasons of wonky algorithms huge percentages of people who took the test came out as “Liberal Quaker” or “Orthodox Quaker.” No Friends were involved in the quiz, hence the archaic names (few Friends have identified as Orthodox for generations).

In the 2000s, this quiz was inadvertently far more successful in outreach than any program conceived by Friends (sorry PYM/FGC/Pendle Hill donors). I think we’ve all become better at media and telling our own story but Kathleen’s question—who tells our story in this time?—is still a key one. After all, Lori Anderson’s checklist of beliefs (on SelectSmart and Beliefnet) are probably one of the most-read definitions of Liberal Quakerism.

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quakerkathleen.org

Updated July 2018

From the NPR description:

Many of us spend lots of time and energy trying to get organized. We KonMari our closets, we strive for inbox zero, we tell our kids to clean their rooms, and our politicians to clean up Washington. But Economist Tim Harford says, maybe we should embrace the chaos. His new book is Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives.

Uh-oh, should we stop being so fussy about cleaned-up rooms. Just last night I spent 45 minutes cajoling and threatening and begging my five year old to clean an amazing block city he had constructed in the living room. Curiously, the link to the podcast was sent to me by my wife.

But this blog is just my life spun out. I don’t aim for keywords and I don’t want to dominate a thought-sphere. If I see a movie and jot down some impressions that attract a small audience, then my blog post is a success. A dozen or so random people a month Google in to spend a couple of minutes reading my thoughts on a fifty-year-old movie. That’s cool. That’s enough. In all the talk of targeting and SEO we sometimes forget that it’s an honor to simply be read.

The other night stayed up late to cuddled with my wife and watch good-natured but flawed Rom-Com. I read some reviews on IMDB and pondered the cliches in the shower the next morning. Boiling these impressions down into 500 words on a train commute would be easy enough. I should do it more.

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.

The movie is 1966’s Torn Curtain. The plot is driven by a classic Hitchcock MacGuffin: a suspense story where we don’t fully understand (or even care about) the objective over which everyone’s fighting. In this case it’s a formula for some sort of anti-missile defense rocket, something called the Gamma Five (umm, sure Hitch, whatever you say).

There’s a rare alchemy needed to cast famous stars in dramatic roles. Do it right and the stardom melts into the character. Hitchcock can pull it off. We love watching a surprisingly complex Cary Grant in North by Northwest, partly because so much of his later comedic acting had becoming self-referential (he was almost always playing Cary Grant playing a character). Somehow Hitchcock used Grant’s familiarity to turn him into a quick-witted modern Everyman with whom the audience could identify.

But the magic doesn’t work in Torn Curtain. From the moment I heard Andrews’ familiar chirpy clipped voice from under the bedcovers I wondered why Mary Poppins was engaging in post-coital pillow talk with The Hustler. I could not muster enough belief suspension to see Paul Newman as a brilliant math nerd and I certainly couldn’t imagine him as a lover to prim and fussy Julie Andrews.

The story revolves around personal and national betrayal and defection but we never really understood why Newman’s Michael Armstrong would defect or why (as we later learn) he has gone into a kind of freelance espionage behind the Iron Curtain. The defection of practically perfect Julie Andrews, who as Sarah Sherman we now know to be particularly determined and loyal, feels even more inexplicable. As I watched the movie bounce aimlessly from one close call to another my mind drifted away to imagine the Hollywood board room where some mogul or another must have strong-armed Hitchcock to cast two up and coming stars for roles which they didn’t really fit.

Then the plot. It meanders. But even more damningly, it focused on the wrong lead. Newman’s Michael Armstrong is predictably linear in his objectives. The most interesting plot turns all come from his assistant/fiancée, Andrews’ Sarah Sherman. She is full of pluck and intelligence. It’s Sherman who insists on coming along on the initial cruise to Copenhagen and it’s her sharp eyes that spot the mysterious actions that tip off the coming betrayals. She notices Armstrong’s tickets, picks up the mysterious book, ferrets out the true destination, and then has the chutzpah to board an East Berlin flight to follow her lying and erratic boyfriend. Her tenacious improvisation reminded me more of Grant in North by Northwest than anything Newman did.

There are some intriguing scenes. The struggle with Gromek in the farmhouse is fascinating in its length and has the kind of brilliantly bizarre camera angles that could only come from Hitchcock. The theater scene was legitimately nail-biting (though I found myself imagining Cary Grant ’s face as he realized how hopeless their escape had become). One of the most mesmerizing scenes was the bus chase—will they have to stop for a passenger?!? It’s the the kind of Hitchcock twist we all love.

After reading the spoilers from WIkipedia and IMDB, I see that many of my complaints have good sources.

• The basic plot was Hitchcock’s idea, inspired by husband/wife defectors Donald and Melinda Maclean and In the fall of 1964, Hitchcock unsuccessfully asked Vladimir Nabokov to write the screenplay.
• The original focus was on the female lead (I was right!) The first screenplay was written by Brian Moore, a screenwriter known for strong female characters. After Hitchcock critiqued the script and hired new writers, Moore accused him of having “a profound ignorance of human motivation.”
• For casting, Hitchcock had originally wanted to reunite North by Northwest’s Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. Grant told him he was too old; Hitchcock then approached Anthony Perkins. But…
• Lew Wassermann was the Hollywood exec who insisted on bankable stars. Hitchcock didn’t feel they were right for the roles and he begrudged their astronomical salaries and constrained schedules. How is it that Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t secured total control over his projects at the point in his career?
• The actors and directors were indeed from different eras: Newman’s method acting didn’t fit Hitchcock’s old school directing style. Hitchcock used his casts as chess pieces and expected the directing and editing to drive his films. When Newman pressed the director for Armstrong’s motivation, Hitchcock reportedly replied “motivation is your salary” (can’t you just hear him saying that in his famously arch tone?)
• Hitchcock didn’t like the way the movie was unfolding and shifted the attention to Newman’s character part-way through. It’s always a bad idea to tinker with something so fundamental so late in the game.

I think Julie Andrews could have stepped up to the challenge of acting as the main protagonist. If Hitchcock had treated her as the Cary Grant “Everyman” character—and made Newman stand in as the dumb blonde!—it would have brilliantly turned Hitchcock on his head. As it is, this movie rates a middling “meh” rating, more interesting for what it could have been than for what it was.

My 9 year old was reading the passage of Jesus’s temptation in the desert found in Matthew 4. I find it such a relatable story. No, no one with pointy ears and a red tail has offered me a kingdom lately, but there are a number of normal human elements nonetheless.

To start with, Jesus is fasting and living without shelter for forty days. I know I become less of the person I want to be when I’m hungry, tired, and stressed. The tempter also proffers a test to see if God cares. That too is familiar: how often do we want something from close family and friends but hold back to see if it’s offered. “Oh, if they really cared I wouldn’t have to remind them.” We do this with God too, confusing changing states of fortune with divine favor rather than welcoming even hard times as a opportunity for growth and understanding.

One of my favorite parts of the Lord’s Prayer is the plea that we not even be led to temptation. There’s a certain humility to that. Jesus might be able to resist the sweet promises of the tempter even when cold and hungry, but I’d rather skip the tests.

It’s hard enough living in this world in a state of humility and cooperation. None of us are perfect, starting with me, and we all certainly have plenty of room to grow. But it’s nice to know that we don’t have to face the tempter alone. God knows just how hard it can be and has our back.

We’ve spent a lot of time here since then. It’s a 24 hour vigil and has been and will continue to be. In Boston there are vigils that have been going seven years. I try to imagine Gregory as a seven year old, having spent his childhood growing up here in this little church. It’s not an impossible scenario.

I also spend a lot of time talking with the faithful Catholics who have come here to protect the church. It’s a cacophony of voices right now–conversations about the church, sure, but that’s only one of the many topics that come up. People are sharing their lives–stories about growing up, about people that are know, about current events… It’s a real community. We’ve been attending this church for years but it’s now that I’m really getting to know everyone.

I sometimes ponder how I, the self-dubbed “Quaker Ranter,” got involved in all of this. Through my wife, of course–she grew up Catholic, became a Friend for eleven years and then “returned to the Church” a few years after our marriage. But there’s more than that, reasons why I spend my own time here. Part is my love of the small and quirky. St Mary’s parishioners are standing up for the kind of churches where people know each other. In an era where menial tasks are hired out, the actual members of St. Marys tend the church’s rosary garden and clean its basement and toilets. They spend time in the church beyond the hour of mass, doing things like praying the rosary or adoration.

The powers-that-be that want St Mary’s closed so badly want a large inpersonal church with lots of professionalized services and a least-common-denominator faith where people come, go and donate their money to a diocese that’s run like a business. But that’s not St. Mary’s. There’s history here. This is a hub of a town, an ancient crossroads, but the bishop wants big churches in the splurge of suburban sprawl. Even we Friends need places like St Mary’s in the world.