My rural island home in Washington State couldn’t be much further—geographically or culturally­—from Manhattan’s Wall Street.  Last fall, when the first actions of Occupy Wall Street began, the movement seemed like an abstraction to me. After hearing Madeline Schaeffer’s podcast at…

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My Meeting is facing a sizable deficit in its budget. It has been previously able to rely on endowment money to take care of sizable expenses. However, as has been announced and stressed many times before, we are largely subsisting on dead peoples' contributions. We do not have the…

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Five men holding cardboard signs huddled together, urging passersby to join them in protest against financial institutions. A month earlier, they had been among hundreds of others camped out in New York City’s Zuccotti Park.  But on this biting cold post-Christmas day, they were the only ones who had ventured through the maze of metal fencing and past security guards to continue a vigil against corporate greed and social inequality. The sight of the barricade snaking around the park’s…

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Friendly Mama: Simplicity. We were told we would each be giving two five minute talks about one of the Quaker Testimonies; the first talk would be about how I came to that Testimony and the second was to be how my life reflects that testimony now. "No problem", thought I. I'm used to speaking before Friends and leading things and exploring and sharing about my spiritual process. That was, however, moments… Continue

A Growing Concern. When I went to question her specifically on some holdings such as Dow Chemical and Walmarts and Coca Cola with snippets from our Earth Testimony... she countered that Quakers did not have an Earth Testimony. They had testimony against war, gambling, alcohol, and tobacco.. and they were running a fund completely clear of that. Then I was entranced by all the large ads in the Friends… Continue

Wess Daniels: the Testimony on Truthfulness: Irregardless of what we call it, listening to, learning, and living the truth are the central activities to the Quaker tradition of truth. These practices of the truth what we see in God’s own acts: when God speaks, God speaks truth, when God acts (as we see in the life of Jesus),… Continue

Everyone is against war. But we still have wars. No one wants to see their son, daughter, nephew, niece or neighbor maimed or killed. But they still are. So what good is a peace testimony except as a means of justifying the existence of the Religious Society of Friends? A peace testimony without peace is useless. It's not even a light in the darkness. It might be a candle, but it's an unlit one. If you want peace it's time to light the candle.



I am not a political activist. I am a… Continue

It struck me recently that maybe I’ve been misreading some stuff in Quaker sources where testimony is mentioned. I noticed it when I had a chance to read some of "Fit for freedom, not for friendship", in an extract quoted in that book from a minute made by a group of Friends early in the twentieth century. Perhaps I’m not the only one to have read Quaker stuff for several years without having understood this. Could a… Continue

According to the St. Louis Friends website,

Also known as the Testimony of Truth, or Truth Testimony, the essence of the Testimony of Integrity is placing God at the center of one's life and refusing to place things… Continue