Emi­ly Provance on liv­ing as a Quak­er in times such as these:

We are to expect to be chal­lenged and changed in our encoun­ters with God. We aren’t yet per­fect. And that’s espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult to deal with in a moment when everything’s already in chaos. Soci­ety seems to be struc­tur­ing itself in such a way that more and more peo­ple are cling­ing to one extrem­ist ortho­doxy or anoth­er, reject­ing any­thing that isn’t ful­ly in line with that point of view, even ver­i­fi­able facts. This is a nat­ur­al psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non in times of uncer­tain­ty. There’s only so much uncer­tain­ty that we can deal with, so when society’s unre­li­able, we clamp down inter­nal­ly: at least I know I’m right. At least I can depend upon my own judgment.