QuakerQuaker

Q&A: I Don't Want To Be Jewish Anymore

An interesting advice column on a Quaker who converted to Judaism and is considering reverting: “I was raised Quaker and now that I my children are grown and my house is quiet I have found myself longing to return to worship with them. I feel guilty about this, but also excited.”

Steven Davison: Are we ready for the Quaker-pocalyse?

"I believe that God is deconstructing our current structures and challenging us to listen up in new ways. Our job is to open ourselves to the new world God is trying to inspire."

AFSC, race, and Quaker exceptionalism in early 20th century

From an interview on a history blog:

Friends deserve tremendous praise for taking unpopular stands and working for interracial equality throughout their history, but that does not make them flawless heroes or even all that different from their contemporaries.

There Is Only Love or Fear

From Amy Outlaw:

There is only love or fear. One can be in-love, or in-fear. The “powers that be”, the systems of domination that keep recreating themselves for at least the last 5000 years maintain their power over us to the extent that they cause us, humans, to exist in-fear instead of in-love.

Public Witness

From Julie Rudd of Wilmington Friends in Ohio:

Imagine, if Ivory soap bars were dropped from the studio ceilings every time someone on television suggested that God is in favor of bombing people back to the Stone Age, or concocting increasingly depraved methods of torturing other human beings.’

What can faith communities do to support the Black Lives Matter movement?

Greg Elliott of AFSC maps out some ideas after watching “Selma”:

Strategy, tactics, coalition building, and organizing all need to take place but so does gathering in community to tell our stories, be vulnerable, and share new visions that can replace the old ones. Safe spaces for communion, sanctuary, and healing are needed in a world that is too often aggressive, hostile, and dangerous, especially for marginalized communities. What if faith communities can help to create those spaces?

"Is this a women's conference?"

Find out the first thing Johan Maurer looks at when he picks up a religious book:

I love God and the church, but I don’t love the religion industry. I don’t love the many ways that the love of power and money has distorted Christian witness and suppressed spiritual gifts. As an adult convert who grew up in an atheist family, I keep hoping for evidence that this or that manifestation of church life is more than just the very tradecraft that Friends rose up to confront.

New group blog: Meetinghouse.xyz

Said to be from young Quakers in the Pacific Northwest but they’re too coy for an “About” page:

Meetinghouse is a gathered community where we seek — in our sharing, encouraging and listening together — how we might challenge the larger Friends (Quaker) movement to better engage the world on issues of authenticity, community, justice, equality, simplicity, nonviolence, and creation care.