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Comment by Rodney Guy Pharris on 1st mo. 31, 2011 at 10:25am

Can anyone help me with this?  In the movie "Matewan", the main character talks about Mennonites during WWI being mistreated at Fort Leavenworth.  Is there a historical reference I can look up for this incident?

Comment by Barbara Quintiliano on 3rd mo. 14, 2010 at 11:09pm

Thanks! I'll be sure to read that.

Comment by T. Vail Palmer, Jr. on 3rd mo. 14, 2010 at 10:52pm

The nation state a possible other God? Yes! really! I figured that out when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation back in the 1960s -- with some help from a hard-nosed Niebuhrian political scientist, Hans J. Morgenthau. Read Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations, 3rd edition (1960), pp. 255-259. See the conclusions I drew in my "The Spirit of the Nation", Quaker Relgious Thought, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Summer 1971), especially pages 14-17.

Comment by Barbara Quintiliano on 3rd mo. 14, 2010 at 9:09pm

Oh ... and I had to look up the word "henotheistic." It means "worshipping a single god while accepting the existence or possible existence of other deities." So, when Miller talks about the "henotheistic loyalties of nationalism" I take it he means that the nation state serves as a possible other God. (no! really???? :-))

Comment by Barbara Quintiliano on 3rd mo. 14, 2010 at 9:06pm

Just came across this startling (for me, anyway) statement:
"The Church is a countercultural social body which nurtures unique loyalties, universal or transcultural loyalties, which supplant the henotheistic loyalties of nationalism. Relative to secular institutions, the Church is a deviant institution and offers a distinctive cultural ethos."

WOW...the Church as deviant institution! I've always sort of felt that true Christianity, i.e., truly following Jesus could only be a subversive endeavor, one that goes against the grain.

So...the Church is a deviant institution ...but...which
Church are we talking about? The institutional Church or ...some sort of more prophetic Church? Maybe I should have posted this on one of the convergent groups :-) Makes my head spin a bit

Anyway, the quotation is from an interesting article by Richard B. Miller entitled "Christian Pacifism and Just War Tenets: How do they Diverge?" Theological Studies 47 (1986): 448-472.

Comment by QuakerQuaker on 12th mo. 30, 2009 at 5:18pm

Mental ward injustices from 1940s brought to light by Quaker and ot...
In September of 1942, Warren Sawyer, a 23-year-old conscientious objector, reported for his volunteer assignment as an attendant at a state mental hospital. The young Quaker was... assigned to work in... [the] Philadelphia State Hospital, best known as Byberry.... "If we COs do nothing about this place to improve it," Sawyer continued, "our stay here has been to no avail and we have accomplished nothing..." Posted by LizOpp