Originally published on the blog of Quaker Universalist Fellowship.

Reviewed by Larry D. Spears.

Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology, by Edwin L. Battistella (Oxford…

The Religious Society of Friends group on Facebook is very quiet on the subject of impending war with Iran. That's a kind of silence I don't want to be around.  I left the group.  Not enough authentic Quakerism for my taste.

Years ago a fire destroyed my collection of books, videos and documents, some rare, and some historical, and all centered on the theme of Intentional Community.  Since then I have been rebuilding that library and my Religious Society of Friends library.  Of course, many artifacts regarding Intentional Community are safely in the care of The Communal Studies Association and various museums.  And there is no worry about the vast collections of Quaker material,  safely guarded in the libraries…

Let him to whom an Idol is nothing, to whom all shadows, Types and Figures, are come to an end, let him exercise his freedom; yet with all tender love and forbearance to those that see not the same liberty ...

Robert Rich "Hidden Things Brought to Light"

As a clerk of IT (information technology) for our Yearly Meeting, I studied the work of our indigenous members, who were busy building our multi-meeting database. That baton has since been passed, and the work continues.  We haven't outsourced (yet) to a non-Quaker commercial firm.  We use PHP with MySQL.

In my day, we kept track of meeting…

I'm reaching out to Friends in higher education with my recent Youtubes, which I'm free to distribute outside of Alphabet (Google) just as well.  A lot of my viewers don't ever watch Youtubes.

Scouting developed as a result of some folks wanting to abstract the fun part of military campaigning. Lets not…

Iconography: The process of guiding and informing human relationships and interactions through outward political, religious, and social ideological and pictorial representations or symbolic forms.

Christonomy: Human relationships and interactions guided and informed solely through the direct intuitive experience of immanent or inherent Presence of the spirit of Christ itself in itself ... a coming out of representational forms and into the thing itself which outward forms…

The following excerpt is from a new post titled "A Colony of Heaven" which can be found at…

Research Notes.

I am ever thankful for those early Quakers who, through the inshining Spirit, were come out of the process of idenitification with and participation in outward forms to guide and informs their relationships, laid down their testimonies in writing. For by so doing, they make it possible for those of us today who share the same spiritual experience to expose to our contemporaries that the Spirit was ministering in such a way even from the very beginnings of the…

Research Note:

Robert Rich published a pamphlet in 1678 titled Hidden Things brought to Light or the Discord of the Grand Quakers Among Themselves. Discovered: In some Letters, Papers, and Passages written to and from George Fox, James Nayler, and John Perrott; Wherein may be seen the Cause and Ground of their Differences, and falling out: And what manner of Spirit moved and acted Each of Them.

I am currently scribing (as opposed to keyboarding) this…

The following excerpt is from an essay titled "The Best Gift of Life." The full essay can be found at Abiding Quaker.

For more than half a century, clear-sighted Friends have been pointing to signs of spiritual distress in our Society. Many of them have been scholars, who have…

Communism is the name of a Party. Socialism is a certain economical policy (which, in its more radical variants, may be naive and preposterous, but not immoral in itself). The real problem we have to speak about is Bolshevism.

Bolshevism – as different from Communism and Socialism - is a political strategy which is grounded in certain assumptions about reality. It is neither restrained to a…

Quaker Journaling 2.0 was ordinary blogging.

What's this?

A rightwing Quaker is hard to find.

"Conservative" Quaker means normally that you are a traditionalist in all matters of religion and personal conduct, but not politically. To their honor, a lot of Quakers have been "Libertarians" when this kind of political ideology was fashionable, but where have they gone?

So let's speak about the Left and the Right. These are the names of conflict parties, not of general concepts, and conflict parties can change their…

[ originally posted on Medium ]

Do you know the etymology of “grok”? To the best of my knowledge, it comes from Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein.

You’d think I’d have talked a lot more about…

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Beginning Wednesday, March 6, 2019

and each Wednesday thereafter.…

The following paragraph is an excerpt from a new essay of mine at…

A walk through time out of Time. Manifesting those Quakers out of all Appearances.

Thirty years ago, I had an experience of seeing a different way of being, conscience and consciousness. It was a glimpse of a glimpse that held fast and true in the far periphery of Life; kissing consciousness. In that moment, I became Quaker. However, Quaker of a different sort.

For twenty years I have attended Quaker Assemblies of various sorts. There was a time I almost sought membership in…

Originally published on The Empty Path: Nonaligned faith and practice in the present

American culture has been fixated from the start on two principles inherited from the 17th century English society that established the colonies: the mandate to cure physical, social, and moral ills, and the primacy of ownership.

Whether Puritan, Catholic, or…

The following paragraph is an excerpt from a new post titled "Opening the…