Friends gathered at the Stark Street meetinghouse for this public-invited showing of 13th, a widely distributed, award-winning documentary about the ongoing cultural and civil war in North America.

Although Lincoln declared the slaves free, an opening shot in his war to preserve the Union, the South was not on board with providing them with full human rights overnight.  Women couldn't vote yet either.  A system of apartheid…

Carol, my mom, shared one of two spoken ministries in Meeting for Worship last First Day. 

I found out about it second hand, as my job, as her chauffeur, was to obtain new triple-A batteries for her hearing device (she's 87) and pack her lunch, so she could eat a bit during Peace & Social Concerns, leaving early to make a concert downtown. I did this during worship.

Anyway, I gather she shared about the threat of WW3 breaking out, which you'll see all over Youtube as a hot,…

[ originally from my Grain of Sand ]

I think I'll do a 9-11 post a couple days early.  That's my wedding anniversary, true for many.  We booked the Rhododendron Garden, and although we had a backup plan, in case it rained, it didn't. That was 1993.



My parents suffered their car crash, fatal to my dad, in October, 2000.  I'd been to Lesotho to help with the aftermath, Julie taking over.  On September 11,…

npym-it-discuss content may be forwarded by any subscriber.  I'm sharing a recent memo (by me) here to give a snapshot of a regional body of Beanite branch Friends taking care of IT / business.

From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com>

Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 12:26:43 -0700

Subject: update on Regional Directory design (future plans)

To: npym-it-discuss <npym-it-discuss@googlegroups.com>…

Given I'd "glommed on" to Wittgenstein, as my thesis advisor Richard Rorty might have put it, as a user of the verb "to glom," I found myself wandering over to the Religion Department half the time.

Victor Prellar was there, in Religion.  He'd been an Anglican priest in one chapter, I think it was, and now he was sharing Wittgenstein with higher level students.  Princeton includes a small grad school, although it prides itself on its focus on undergrads.  I was invited, as an…

A "refugee" is "someone seeking refuge" which quickly expands to us all in meditation or prayer. 

Whole communities came to the New World on those dangerous watercraft, seeking liberty, freedom from persecution, the right to be left alone.  Relationships were continued, at a village level.

Thinking of refugee camps as full of solitary individuals, each needing a desk job and a bus pass, a separate singleton existence, is of course unrealistic. 

Extended families often do…

I realized somewhat acutely, in some recent discussions here on Q2, that we're sometimes miles apart in our use of terms, without even realizing it sometimes.

In looking over archival copies of what dad and his team put together, for Libya, looking ahead some twenty or more years, I'm impressed by a confidant 1960s, a time of going to the moon. 

Urban planning was something to get a degree in, a new discipline in the US. I was born while dad was finishing up his PhD studies at…

I don't know about other cities, but Portland-based Oregonians have a penchant for referring to their own fair city, by its three-letter international airport code: PDX. 

You'll see that everywhere, as a part of the branding, right up there with Portlandia -- the statue, not the TV show, though why not share that word, make it more multi-media?…

Earlier this morning I finally grabbed a copy of Ashley Montagu's Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Kindle Edition, for under $8.

I cite this book often in my copious writings on racism, but will now confess to not having accessed it directly (to the best of my recollection), only come across juicey quotes from it, in books by others.   I'd cut and paste such an example quote right now, but Kindle software hinders cutting and pasting so never mind. Amazon would…

US citizens are looking to Washington, DC for "gun control" apparently forgetting this is the world's hub for arms dealing and war planning. 

"Gun control" is not the name of that city's main business.

[ Moving the US capital around, rotating its location, more like the Olympics, might be a way to hold the nation together, but these days it's looking …

Note that I use the indefinite article on purpose, "A" and not "The".  The dress code Friends expect and even enforce on occasion (no shirt, new shoes, no service), at least in a Business context, is in no way universal and is of course reflective of ambient dress codes, role models in the surrounding culture.

For example, driving while naked is not permitted in Portland except on designated days and routes on a bicycle.  Some don't bother with permission but that's…

Although US president Barack Obama is not a direct descendant of the Anglo-American slave trade, his abolitionist stance versus nuclear weapons is consistent with abolitionist values championed by a few Quakers in Underground Railroad times. 

You may be thinking "a few Quakers" is an understatement given Friends had disowned all slave-owning by around the early 1800s, pre Civil War.  Good point, however the US Government took the position that slavery was legal at the time, and indeed…

I'm asking an open-ended query, accepting in advance that some Friends may have made up their minds on this question (see title), whereas many more will have never posed such a query to themselves. 



We might as well give it some time to season, invite feedback. 



As Clerk of IT Committee for NPYM, it's a part of my designated role to invite open forum on such questions, debate if you will, worship-sharing, worship-discussion.



For more context: …

What I find refreshingly "new" in Quakerism (well-established by now) is a mode of corporate self governance designed around the concepts of managing a business, a shared enterprise.



A monthly Business Meeting is deliberately kept open to involvement by the whole community and treasures transparency in its doings, as manifest by the…