A Progressive Journal and Forum for Discussion and Study
Robert Juma Wafula For One to Understand the History of a Place, One Must Know the People Involved The history of the foundation of the Quaker movement in East Africa is straightforward and easy to understand. At least it seems so, basing oneself on face value research. But in reality, with its combination of a …
Continue reading “Crossroads of Western Quakerism in Africa”
Ann K. Riggs July 2, 2001 Friends General Conference GatheringBlacksburg, Virginia Be still, and know that I am God. Psalm 46:10 Introduction — Stillness Materials giving information about the 2001 Gathering and its theme included a memorable quotation from Thomas Kelly and a reflection on the value of stillness: “We hope you will join us …
Continue reading “Stillness: Surrounding, Sustaining, Strengthening”
Reviewed by Thomas D. Paxson, Jr. Many who come to the Religious Society of Friends are not introduced in any systematic way to the scriptural passages which most spoke to the experience of early Friends, which strengthened them in their faith and helped them keep to the Light. Nor is this surprising, since few texts …
Continue reading ““A Catechism and Confession of Faith,”* by Robert Barclay, A Review”
Reviewed by Chuck Fager Early in the morning of Second Month 4, 1989, Kim Sung Soo learned that Ham Sok Hon had died. “When I looked at him in his coffin,” Kim writes, “I felt it was as if a part of myself had died. Faced with his death my mind began to wander through …
Reviewed by Chuck Fager Shameful History of Quaker Involvement with the Klan Besides producing an interesting story for young readers, Cynthia Stanley Russell has also done something very important for adults in this debut novel: she has written as a Quaker about the reality of Quaker involvement in the Ku Klux Klan. This is the …
Continue reading ““Mim and the Klan: A Hoosier Quaker Farm Family’s Story,”* a Review”
Chuck Fager is Editor of Quaker Theology. He was also Co-Clerk of the 2001 Quaker Peace Roundtable, and serves as Clerk of the Religious Education Committee of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. He has just become Director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Howell John Harris teaches History at the University of Durham, England. Thomas D. Paxson, Jr. is Professor and …
By Anne K Riggs, Associate Editor In this issue of Quaker Theology we highlight concerns of peace and violence, ecclesiology and theological method, or ways of thinking and talking about theological subjects – about God, about ourselves in relation to God and to one another in a worshiping community, and as people who worship and who live …
By Ann K. Riggs. April 23 to 25, 2001, I was one of those representing Friends at the launch of the Decade to Overcome Violence of the World Council of Churches (2001-2010). We met at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville, Tennessee, a retreat and education center associated with the United Methodist Church. The lovely setting, with …
By Chuck Fager Ecclesiology, the nature of the church, is a bubbling issue among American Friends today, at least of the unprogrammed variety. Almost anywhere you care to look, Yearly Meetings are struggling with their structures, worrying about staff or no staff, laying down or propping up committees, taking corporate sabbaticals, and so forth. This …
Continue reading “Friends’ Ecclesiology and The Quaker-Wide Web”
(Originally presented at the Quaker Peace Roundtable 2001) By Ron Mock I. Introduction I have been asked to bring to the 2001 Quaker Peace Roundtable a reflection on what the Bible teaches about peacemaking. I accepted the task with some reservations. For one thing, among the peace churches (at least) the subject has gotten a little …
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By Chuck Fager Are there other ways of looking at the Bible and what it may have to teach us about Peacemaking? In particular, are there other ways to take the Bible seriously, on this topic? Ron Mock invites his readers to develop alternative approaches, and here I’ll attempt to sketch one. Following Ron’s example, …
Osborn Cresson, of Mount Holly Monthly Meeting, is a retired special education teacher who lived in Monteverde, Costa Rica, for many years. He has just published a book about his family’s experiences in Afghanistan (www.quaker.org/afghanistan). Chuck Fager is Editor of Quaker Theology. His latest book is, A Quaker Declaration of War. Brother Jeffrey Gros, FSC, …
Reviewed by Thomas Finger1 Western systematic, or constructive, theology has developed largely within “mainline” communions– most notably, Reformed, Lutheran and Catholic. Since about 1970, however, a broadly postmodern atmosphere has encouraged explicit theologizing among more particular, often marginalized, groups: blacks, women, Hispanics and many others. And since about 1980, these have been joined by “believers’ …
Reviewed by Jeffrey Gros An African American Womanist Perspective on Violence The African American “Womanist” perspective, developed in this volume, is an important explication from within a culture that has been the recipient of violence. It provides both a critique of society’s violent culture and of those whose advocacy of nonviolence emerges from a dominant …
Continue reading ““Refiner’s Fire: A Religious Engagement with Violence”* a Review”
Core Beliefs of Quakers By Dana Kester-McCabe Recently I attended a weekend gathering to study Quaker theology. It was an introduction to the terms and the traditions used in exploring this topic. The event was hosted by Chuck Fager and Ann Riggs. It was intended to inspire more people to explore and discuss what the …
Chuck Fager is Editor of Quaker Theology. He was also Co-Clerk of the 2001 Quaker Peace Roundtable. His newest book is The Harlot’s Bible: Quaker Essays, forthcoming from Kimo Press. Thomas Finger, Mennonite World Conference, author of Christian Theology: An Eschatological Approach (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1985) and Self, Earth & Society: Alienation & Trinitarian Transformation (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1997) is currently engaged in …
By Chuck Fager. We didn’t plan it that way, but this issue is about learning Quaker theology from history, mostly recent history. And some of the best recent historical insights into Quaker theology that I’ve seen have come from outside, from our sister denomination the Unitarian-Universalists. Specifically, through the work of John C. Morgan, a Unitarian minister …
Continue reading “Editor’s Introduction #3 — Notes on Contributors”
Copyright © by John C. Morgan. Reprinted by permission. INTRODUCTION The issue facing Unitarian Universalists entering a new century is that we often lack spiritual focus and depth, at a time when increasing numbers of newcomers to our congregations are demanding both. The decades of “Enlightenment” Unitarianism are ending. We can no longer see …
By Alison M. Lewis, Ph.D. Caroline Emelia Stephen has enjoyed a long-standing reputation among Friends as a Quaker theologian. Quaker Strongholds (1891) is considered a “Quaker classic;” one hundred years after its first publication, Friends General Conference book catalog calls it “one of the clearest visions of our faith.” Stephen was also the author of Light Arising: Thoughts …
Here’s some good news: there are signs that American Friends, at least in the largest unprogrammed branch, are beginning to awaken from a long sleep of unawareness of their recent history. I call this period the Age of Amnesia, an unarticulated sense that Quakerism was effectively invented just a few weeks before thee and me …
by Wilmer Cooper. Friends United Press/Pendle Hill, 195 pages Reviewed by Chuck Fager Not far from where I live in central Pennsylvania, there is a lovely valley populated heavily by Amish and plain Mennonites. Every Wednesday morning, in the valley’s main town, there is a farmer’s market which serves up a generous slice of true …
by Stephen W. Angell. It would be a mistake for historians of twentieth-century religious thought to write about Quaker theology in isolation from other religious ideas, both Christian and non-Christian, which in many ways envelop it. Quaker contributions to the religious world have become a small but inextricable part of a much larger picture, and …
By Chuck Fager. In good Quaker fashion, we begin with queries: What is theology, and why should Friends be interested in it? Early Friends were often loudly skeptical about theology, which George Fox referred to scornfully as “windy notions.” Their critique had at least five major points: Intellectualizing about religion takes people away from experiencing …
By R. Melvin Keiser. To speak of the nature and origin of Quaker theology is to raise the question of how systematic we should be in our theological pursuits as Quakers. As a Quaker theologian and postcritical philosopher I am drawn to systematic theology because I am interested in how intellectual principles structure our thought …
By George H. Tavard. In this paper I will take the words, mystic, and mysticism in the sense they have in the Catholic spiritual tradition. Over the centuries there have been innumerable believers, lay or ordained, who have been given access to the presence of God in them in ways that are unsuspected or at …
By Alvin Joaquín Figueroa. This article is a preliminary draft of a more ambitious project. It is a skeleton and a brainstorming process of some ideas I have been examining for a while. I would like to study the relationship, and points of convergence and divergence, between the religious discourses of Spain’s most important mystic …
Reviewed by Chuck Fager. There are many true and important statements in this report. One of the truest and most important, however, is regrettably buried on page 244. Let’s begin there, because its content is foundational: “This profile provides information about the Friends who were selected to participate….They cannot be presumed to represent the Religious Society …
By Edward James. A Response to: “The Making of a Quaker Atheist,” by George Amoss, Jr., in Quaker Theology #1. (Amoss’s comments follow.) Mother Angelica of the Eternal Word TV Network likes to describe those Catholic churches which have abandoned or modified their sacred traditions to be more in tune with the modern world as “electric churches”: …
Continue reading “An Exchange: Quaker Theology Without God?”
George Amoss, Jr. is a member of Homewood Meeting in Baltimore. He edits the Journal of the Quaker Universalist Fellowship, and established the Quaker Electronic Archive and Meeting place website, at: http://www.qis.net/~daruma/index.html Chuck Fager is a member of State College, Pennsylvania Meeting. He writes frequently on Quakerism, and teaches English at Penn State University. Alvin Joaquin Figueroa is an Assistant …
In good Quaker fashion, we begin with queries: What is theology, and why should Friends be interested in it? Early Friends were often loudly skeptical about theology, which George Fox referred to scornfully as “windy notions.” Their critique had at least five major points: Intellectualizing about religion takes people away from experiencing God and the …
By Chuck Fager I. A Letter from Lincoln Reflecting on the Kosovo war as a Quaker, a recent joke came to mind: Question: What did one paradigm say to the other paradigm? Answer: Shift happens. What sorts of shifts does Kosovo confront us with? There are at least five that I have noticed and want …
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Copyright © George Amoss, Jr., 1999All rights reserved. How did I come to be a Quaker and an atheist? I was raised as neither; my early life was filled with faith in God and a fascination with the Catholic priesthood and “the religious life”–life under vows in an order of friars or monks. It was …
Ann K. Riggs At the Fourth World Conference in Faith and Order in Montreal, 1963, the Commission presented the influential text, “Scripture, Tradition and Traditions.”2 This text developed an understanding of Christian Scripture as the creation of “a tradition which goes back to our Lord.” All Christians are “indebted to that tradition inasmuch as we have …
Continue reading “The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) as a Religious Community”
AN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY Melvin B. Endy, Jr. The problems posed by the attempt to define Puritanism have driven some scholars to substituting description for definition and others to the use of the term as an umbrella for the religious experience shared by groups as disparate as mildly dissatisfied Anglicans, on the one band, and the …
George Amoss, Jr. is a member of Homewood Meeting in Baltimore. He edits the Journal of the Quaker Universalist Fellowship, and established the Quaker Electronic Archive and Meeting place website, at: http://www.qis.net/~daruma/index.html Melvin Endy, who is currently a member of the Division of Human development in St. Mary’s College, St. Mary’s, Maryland, is the author …