Quaker Theology

XXX – Contributors

  • Theology & Peace Witness by Chuck Fager

    A Letter to the Next Director of Quaker House, Fayetteville-Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Here’s the job description in a nutshell: as the Director of Quaker House (QH), besides managing a small non-profit, the essence of the work a call to continue a protracted, hand-to-hand combat with the Spirit of War, operating behind the lines of…

  • Political Thought of John Dickinson and William Penn — Two Books Reviewed by H. Larry Ingle

    “Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson” and “Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn. Reviewed by H. Larry Ingle

  • Four-Track Mind: The True Story of the Brothers Doug by Doug Gwyn

    My early songwriting tended to be more jokey and satirical than more recent efforts. But from the beginning in 1977 to the present, I have worked with irony and paradox, humorous or not, to explore my experience of grace and my understanding of God as someone who subverts and overturns my human categories for the…

  • From “The Church, the Draft Board, and Me” by George Amoss, Jr.

    This recounts my conflicts with the Catholic Church, whose ethics were called into question by the war in Vietnam, and the U.S. Selective Service System, which refused to honor my conscientious objection to participation in war. In telling that story, it sketches my evolution, despite encounters with predatory priests and a vindictive draft board, from…

  • Editor’s Introduction by Chuck Fager

    To be candid, I’m not accustomed to being consulted by Evangelical Friends. I’m not one, and over the past forty years, I’ve often found myself on opposite sides from many vocal or leading Evangelicals. Nevertheless, I’ve learned things from Evangelicals, and on good Read More

  • Editor’s Introduction, #33

    By Chuck Fager Twenty years and 32 issues ago, we asked “What is theology, and why should Friends be interested in it?” Good questions. Here’s a true story that happened since, and offers one answer: Several years ago I visited a “Quaker” school in the South, supposedly to talk about Read More

  • Moment of Truth: Wilmington Yearly Meeting Divides over a Familiar Set of Issues

    By Stephen W. Angell Wilmington Yearly Meeting (WYM), assembled at the Friends Meeting in Maryville, Tennessee, on the last weekend of July, released five meetings (four monthly meetings and one preparatory meeting) that requested to sever connections with the yearly meeting. Read More

  • The Separation Generation

    By Chuck Fager; with material edited and adapted from previous issues of Quaker Theology. I – Background It’s not easy – in fact, impossible – to pick a starting date for what I call the “Separation Generation” in American Quakerism. My personal preference is July 1977, when the first major interbranch conference in decades, gathered in…

  • Faith, Power, and Trump

    [Originally titled: “Imminence, Rootedness, and Realism: Eschapocalyptic Action (or not) in the Age of Trump”] r. scot miller In this Age of Trump, two urgent questions have emerged for many Friends and Progressive Christians. Two common responses to our steadily deteriorating Read More

  • Editor’s Introduction, #29

        There’s some good news in American Quakerdom this fall: North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM), whose travails we have been following for two years, has decided not to split, and the two-year effort to purge its handful of “liberal” meetings has been Read More

  • Back From The Brink: North Carolina Yearly Meeting Says No To A Split

    Chuck Fager I North Carolina Yearly Meeting-FUM (NCYM) has ended the two-year effort to purge its “liberal meetings.” This seems to be the most definite outcome of its showdown annual session on August 13 and 14, 2016. It was a very close thing. The leadership Read More

  • “Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey”* A Review

    Chuck Fager It’s my fate to spend a fair amount of time on the larger Quaker-oriented Facebook groups.That is often a challenging, and even dispiriting experience, especially when talk turns to “what Friends believe,” and how that is evidenced in actual Quaker Read More

  • “Quiet Heroes: A Century of American Quakers’ Love and Help for the Japanese and Japanese-American”* A Review

    Chuck Fager Want a good definition for “the middle of nowhere”? Try heading north on US Highway 395, almost 120 miles past Death Valley in California, and 100-plus from the eastern entrance to Yosemite. This is the Owens Valley. It’s home to bands of Paiute-Shoshone Indians, some Read More

  • Editor’s Introduction, #28

    This issue covers a broad range of concerns and issues. An account of disciplined interreligious education and dialogue work opens the volume. It describes an approach that is informed by Quaker spirituality, across gaps of understanding and belief that Read More

  • The Death of Peg Morton: A View from Eugene Friends Meeting

    Dina Wills I The small, beautiful wood-paneled Meeting Room of the Eugene Friends Meeting (EFM) was packed with at least 150 people, many of them standing around the walls. The hand-made wooden benches were crowded, with chairs anywhere a chair could fit. The door Read More

  • The Still Small Voice in the Wilderness: The Treatment of Silence in Two Abolitionist Quaker Narratives—Tracy Chevalier’s The Last Runaway and Linda Spalding’s The Purchase

    Reviewed by Selena Middleton The past year has seen the beginning of what could be a renaissance of Quakerism in the mainstream collective consciousness, from Martin McDonagh’s film Seven Psychopaths in which Christopher Walken plays a serene, yet foul-mouthed Quaker, to two books Read More

  • Introduction to Issue #21

    This is a packed issue, full of high-content, substantive thought and reporting. First, there are two updates by Associate Editor Stephen Angell on the continuing conflict in Indiana Yearly Meeting. They continue our detailed coverage of this significant Read More

  • 00. Can the American Friends Service Committee Get Its Quaker Groove Back?

    Chuck Fager I: The Background of a Concern What we’ve dubbed “The Great Quaker Turnover” has been rolling through Quakerism over the past year. Practically all the “alphabet soup” Friends groups have been changing their top executives: FUM, QUNO, FCNL, FGC, FWCC, Friends Journal. Read More

  • “To Be Broken and Tender: A Quaker Theology for Today”* A Review

    Reviewed by Stephen W. Angell Margery Post Abbott has been a very productive and useful writer in the area of Quaker spirituality over recent years. I have particularly enjoyed the book that she co-edited with Peggy Senger Parsons, Walk Worthy of Your Calling: Quakers and the Traveling Read More

  • Editor’s Introduction, #16

    This issue marks the tenth anniversary of Quaker Theology. It was in the autumn of 1999 when Ann Riggs and I set out on this continuing journey. The math of our venture, however, is out of whack. The plan was to publish two issues per year. We kept to it tolerably well for Read More

  • Rufus Jones and the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry: How a Quaker Helped to Shape Modern Ecumenical Christianity

    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 Read More

  • Reflecting Theologically from the Gathered Meeting: The Nature and Origin of Quaker Theology

    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 Read More

  • Why Study Theology?

    Editor’s Introduction #2 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 Read More

  • Some Quaker Reflections on the Kosovo War

    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…

  • “The Creation of Quaker Theory: Insider Perspectives,”* A Review

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager The title of this book resonates with irony at several levels. On the surface, as the “insiders” who contributed to it are mainly academics, or serious scholars; the pages exude a guild mentality. Moreover, its contributors, at the one actual Read More

  • 01: “Truly Radical, Non-violent, Friendly Approaches”

    (1): Challenges to the American Friends Service Committee H. Larry Ingle Reprinted from Quaker History, Volume 105, Number 1, Spring 2016. Published by Friends Historical Association Nearly twenty-five years ago, on the occasion of the American Friends Service Committee’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Swarthmore College historian Read More

  • 02: From Supporter to Friendly Critic: How AFSC Changed Me

    H. Larry Ingle Friends learn from experience, actually from a dialogue with experience; at its best, the dialogue is actually a trialogue with God’s Spirit an essential third participant. That’s what happened to me as I reflect back on my encounters with the American Read More

  • 03: The Cold War’s Effect AFSC, 1947-49

    H. Larry Ingle Reprinted from Peace & Change, 23 (Jan. 1998) In a year when it received the recognition of a Nobel Peace Prize, the American Friends Service Committee entered into a period of marked transition. This study of the impact of the cold war on the organization Read More

  • 04: Pickett vs. Chambers: A Case Study of Elite Class Power

    H. Larry Ingle Reprinted from: An Early Assessment: U.S. Quakerism in the 20th Century. Papers from the Quaker History Roundtable, 2017. The story I am about to tell is not one that I take great pleasure in relating. For one thing, it deals with a Friend whose life was, in most ways and as Read…

  • 05: “Speak Truth to Power:” A Thirty Years Retrospective (1985)

    H. Larry Ingle When the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) published “Speak Truth to Power” in the spring of 1955, it did two important things, one advertent, one inadvertent. The authors intended to, and did, produce the most lucid pacifist tract ever penned in the United States; Read More

  • 06: AFSC and Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting & Association

    An Exchange About Numbers; (SAYMA), 2011-2012 From SAYMA’s minutes, 2011: [SAYMA =] Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting & Association June 9-12, 2011[Below: SAYMA’s logo & Map of Meetings] Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, North Carolina41st Annual Meeting 41-32: AFSC and Quakers Free Polazzo serves as one Read More

  • 07: A Flicker of Hope: A Friendly Letter

    Written & published by Chuck Fager Issue Number SevenTenth Month 1981 Dear Friend, On the 30th of Ninth Month [1981], near the Oregon coast, a meeting took place which could be very important for the future of American Quakerism. The two top executives of the American Friends Service Committee Read More

  • 08: Another False Dawn: AFSC, 1991-1992

    A Friendly Letter, Written & published by Chuck Fager, Issue #127, 12th Month 1991 As the Corporation and Board of the American Friends Service Committee gathered for its annual meeting on 11/15-17, AFSC was on the brink of important change: A new Board clerk has taken hold. A new Executive Secretary, the most pivotal Quaker…

  • 09: Introduction to Quaker Service at the Crossroads – 1988

    Chuck Fager There’s an old Quaker joke: a young woman attends her first business meeting as an adult member, looking to make her mark, and sits next to a weighty older Friend in a grey bonnet who is knitting quietly. An agenda item comes up which requires nominations Read More

  • 10: Gilbert White & AFSC: A Letter to the Editor, Friends Journal, 2006

    H. Larry Ingle & Chuck Fager (Published in the April 2006 issue.) Dear Editor, We were very disappointed in Margaret Bacon’s review of the biography of Gilbert White, Living With Nature’s Extremes. The reviewer dismissed with a throwaway comment the deep concerns Read More

  • 11: Can the AFSC Get Its Quaker Groove Back?

    By Chuck Fager Adapted from Quaker Theology, Issue #18, 2010-2011 I: The Background of a Concern What we’ve dubbed “The Great Quaker Turnover” has been rolling through Quakerism over the past year. Practically all the “alphabet soup” Friends groups have been changing their top executives: Read More

  • Is There Life after Death in Quaker North Carolina?

    Chuck Fager Demolishing a 320-Year-Old Meeting     At 10:58 Eastern time,  Seventh Day (Saturday), Eighth Month (August) 5, 2017, at Quaker Lake Camp near Liberty, NC, Clerk Michael Fulp asked, “Do you approve?”     The assembled Friends, Read More

  • Editor’s Introduction, #30/#31

    This double issue is an effort to recover some momentum that’s been lost in the past year. The last issue, #29, appeared almost eighteen months ago. Yet our “mission statement” on the copyright page says our intention is to publish two issues per Read More

  • An Increasingly Familiar Story: Northwest Yearly Meeting Expulsions & Sequelae

    Chuck Fager We’ve also been following the growing tensions in Northwest Yearly Meeting, out west (see Issue #24:, Issue #27  ; and Issue #28 ).     In January 2017, these tensions came to a head when the YM leadership announced a purge of Read More

  • Wilmington YM: Another Yearly Meeting Schism?

    By Stephen W. Angell The Fairview Minute This eloquent minute (around which most of the discussion in annual sessions in Wilmington Yearly Meeting was based) was approved on January 15, 2017, in a small rural Friends’ church in New Vienna, Ohio. It was in response to a longstanding Read More

  • “Many Friends Do Not Know ‘Where They Are’”: Some Divisions in London Yearly Meeting During the First World War”

    Reprinted from Quaker Theology #11, 2005Thomas C. Kennedyauthor of British Quakerism 1860-1920 Late in 2001 in the terrible aftermath of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, Scott Simon, newsman and commentator for National Public Radio who claims membership in the Society of Friends, presented solemn public testimony in which he Read More

  • Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog

    A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle Reprinted from Quaker Theology #8, 2003 Oxford-educated political scientist Isaiah Berlin, in his minor classic “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1953), divided people into two groups, those who understood one big thing like the hedgehog and those, like the fox, who knew many things. The subject of…

  • Everyday/Extraordinary Resistance: Two True Stories from the Vietnam Years

    Leafleting a Meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marion Anderson By 1970, I had been organizing against the war full-time for five years. First, in Washington where I was an organizer of the televised National Teach-In which was watched by about ten million Americans and then in Michigan as chairman of Michi-gan Clergy Read…

  • Remembering Tom Fox Introduction to: Tom Fox Was My Friend. Yours, Too.

    Chuck Fager Christian Peacemakers Kidnapped in Baghdad John Stephens called me with the news: Tom Fox and three other members of the Christian peacemaker Teams’ group (CPT) in Baghdad had been kidnaped. It was just after Thanksgiving, late November, 2005.     That summer of 2005 John had been an intern at Quaker Read More

  • Resisting Oppression: Friends and the Stuart Restoration, 1660-1689

    H. Larry Ingle Someone with more insight than I possess once said that history opens up a foreign land, one that moderns cannot know about without an act of will and then only fitfully. This pregnant observation comes into sharp relief when we Quakers consider, as we Read More

  • Study War Some More (If You Want to Work for Peace)

    Chuck Fager Introduction Why a study on Quaker peace strategy? From some current perspectives, laboring over the stra-tegy and history of Quaker peace work is a curiosity, if not a waste of time. Larger and more influential groups are at work on peace issues, especially in Washington DC; isn’t our main role Read More

  • “No Country for Jewish Liberals,” “The Half Life of a Free Radical”* Two Reviews

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager These two autobiographical memoirs should be much more different.  They ended up in a stack of books by my recliner, and I was soon struck by a kind of spiritual resonance and counterpoint between them, across seemingly vast gaps of culture and personality. Read More

  • Nixon’s First Cover-Up, The Religious Life of A Quaker President

    Nixon’s First Cover-Up, The Religious Life of A Quaker President. By H. Larry Ingle. University of Missouri, 271 pages. Reflections on a “Quaker” President Who Wasn’t Actually a Quaker By Lon Fendall [Note: This essay was originally presented to a panel at the 2015 American Academy of Religion meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.] I want to…

  • “Ham Sok Hon: Voice of the People and Pioneer of Religious Pluralism in Twentieth Century Korea; Biography of a Korean Quaker”* A Review

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager Reprinted from Quaker Theology #5, Autumn 2001 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…

  • Review Essay: Resistance Theology in Niebuhr, Barth, Rauschenbush & Dorrien; Irony & Living a Theological Saga

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager Adapted from Quaker Theology #11 – Spring-Summer 2005 Six Books by Gary Dorrien, published by Westminster John Knox, Louisville:     The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining     Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. 2001. 494 pges..    Read More

  • The Influence of Psychoanalysis and Popular Psychology on Quaker Thought & Practice: An Exploratory Survey

    Jacob Stone One Saturday back in the early 1990’s I found myself in a brief workshop sponsored by a Quaker organization; there was a short business meeting, a presentation, some socialization and networking during “dinner on the grounds”. And then…..     Read More

  • Narrative Theology: The Land

    Ken Bradstock On the Appalachian Plateau in Southwestern Pennsylvania, a farm lies fallow from decades of disuse. The fine old Pennsylvania bank barn has collapsed toward the silo. The roof is lying on the wooden ruins and they, in turn, have buckled and fainted onto Read More

  • Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, and Quaker Leadership: A Problem for Friends

    H. Larry Ingle Lately, I have come to see Whittaker Chambers as one of the most fascinating Quakers in the middle of the 20th century. He was also the member of the American Communist Party for about thirteen years, from 1925 to 1938. He joined the rural Pipe Creek Meeting, Read More

  • Tom Fox: In Memoriam: Introduction

    by Chuck Fager I — News of the Kidnaping of Tom Fox John Stephens called me with the news, on November 26, 2005: Tom Fox and three other members of the Christian peacemaker Teams’ group in Baghdad had been kidnaped. In the summer of 2005, John was an intern at Quaker House in Fayetteville, Read…

  • A Godly Play Story About Tom Fox

    Today I want to tell you about a Quaker man named Tom Fox who believed in walking cheerfully over the earth answering to that of God in everyone. Tom was a dad. He had 2 children, a girl and a boy. Tom loved his children and loved being a dad. He loved to cook and…

  • Context/Content/Community: Teaching Interfaith Dialogue as a Quaker

    Rebecca Mays Context In 2006, a Quaker-style ‘leading’ came out of a time of gathered worship; I felt I heard a direction to “go and learn how they know of me.” I had been doing a Quaker-Jewish interreligious dialogue with a woman rabbi in the Jewish renewal movement for about a decade Read More

  • Feeling Light Within: Peg Morton Remembered For The Way She Lived and Died

    Теd Taylor I Feeling Light Within Peg Morton remembered For the way she lived and died Ted Taylor Eugene, Oregon – Margaret Miner Morton, better known as Peg Morton in the activist and Quaker community, died Dec. 19 at age 85 of natural causes. Before she died, Read More

  • Reflection on Peg Morton

    Ken Bradstock Every living thing on this planet dies. Everything from the tiniest of microbes to the Great Sequoias eventually comes to an end. The question is not “Will we die?” but how that happens. For many of us, the decisions are made for us and the end comes Read More

  • Three Reflections on Same Sex Marriage

    Philip Gulley Why I Support Same Gender Marriage Several years ago, I was attending a Quaker conference north of Chicago and began talking with a man from Ohio, who spoke in the plain language of our Quaker ancestors. Lots of thee’s and thou’s. It seemed pretentious, as if he were subtly reminding Read More

  • Walt Whitman of the New York “Aurora:” Editor, Transcendentalist, Quaker, Perfectionist

    Mitchell Santine Gould Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire…had been flitting through my previous life Walt Whitman,“A Backwards Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” Although an origin story has always naturally been part of the biographer’s bread and butter, the field Read More

  • North Carolina & Northwest Yearly Meeting Updates: Ambushed, Sandbagged, and Kicked Down The Road

    Chuck Fager I Have you seen moments like this in detective films, or in stories? When Sherlock, or whoever the sleuth is, hunches forward and shouts: “Good God, Watson! How could I be such a FOOL??” (Usually, it means things are about to get very interesting.) I had that kind Read More

  • Editor’s Introduction, #27

    If there’s a keyword for this issue. It’s “Release.” As Stephen Angell points out in his report here, “release” has had an honorable heritage in the Quasker glossary, mainly referring either to the sending of a Friend (or Friends) on some mission Read More

  • Quakers and “Transformation”

    An Editorial Commentary You ask me, it’s a sure sign of a needed change coming: Just as I was finishing up this piece, I found a notice that The Center for Spiritual & Social Transformation, part of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California just changed its name (on September 1, Read More

  • George Fox University and West Hills Friends:

    Controversy and Conflict in NorthwestYearly Meeting By Stephen W. Angell [Editor’s Note: In Issue #24, we reported on a two-sided struggle that had appeared in Northwest Yearly Meeting (NWYM). On one side, there emerged a visible support group for LGBT students, staff and alumni at the Newberg. Oregon campus of NWYM’s academic offspring, Read More

  • Part II: Northwest Yearly Meeting Elders “Release” (i.e., Expel) West Hills Friends Meeting

    Background On July 24, 2015, only hours after the annual NWYM sessions had adjourned, NWYM elders communicated to West Hills Friends Meeting (WHF) that they had been expelled, or, in the el­ders’ term, “released,” from the yearly meeting. This action has a long pre-history that Read More

  • Encounters from Beyond Quakerism, Belief in Extraterrestrials And the Boundaries of Liberal Religion

    Isaac May Readers of Friends Journal, the leading periodical of liberal Quakerism, would have been surprised in early 1994 to see a small ad placed in the classifieds section in the back of the magazine. Amidst blurbs for Quaker-related Bed and Breakfasts, Read More

  • Mary Dyer Musings – A Measure of Light , A Novel by Beth Powning, and Mary’s Joy, a Play by Jeanmarie Simpson

    Jeanmarie Simpson Following a 2005 performance of my play, A Single Woman, about the life of first US Congresswoman and lifelong pacifist, Jeannette Rankin, I was approached by a Quaker woman. She was moved by my work and felt compelled to tell me about Mary Dyer, Read More

  • “Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution”* Reviewed

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager Can this be just a coincidence?ྭThe full-color cover image on Holy Nation is an Edward Hicks “Peaceable Kingdom” painting. It’s the one featuring William Penn in the background, making a peace trea­ty with the Indians, while to the Read More

  • “A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation”* A Review

    Reviewed by Chel Avery “What sustains sustainability?” Mark Helpsmeet(1) has proposed this question as an alternative title for Doug Gwyn’s deep examination of Quaker life and sustainability. How do Quaker thought and Quak­er practice provide a firm foundation for individuals Read More

  • Editor’s Introduction, #26

    This issue is the longest in Quaker Theology’s sixteen-year tenure. It wasn’t intended to be that. But both weighty events and substantive material kept accumulating, and here we are. It has also been one of the most arduous issues to prepare. When the disturbances in North Read More

  • Quaker Theology is not Explained by Apocalyptic Expectation and Delay

    BY HUGH ROC Introduction Douglas Gwyn’s thesis (Gwyn, 1986) that Quaker theology originates in imminent apocalyptic expectation has achieved a degree of influence. In its own right, Gwyn’s work stands as an expression of passionate personal conviction. Gwyn makes an empathetic Read More

  • A Review, “Personality and Place, the Life & Times of Pendle Hill”

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager “Sometimes I look around and think, Pendle Hill is God’s little joke on the Society of Friends.” – Janet Shepherd, former Dean NOTE: From one perspective, it’s a conflict of interest for me to review this book. After all, I’m described in Read More

  • “A Convergent Model of Renewal: Remixing the Quaker Tradition in a Participatory Culture”*

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager There’s more than little déjà vu about A Convergent Model of Renewal. Quakerism, Wess Daniels argues, will be renewed by the coming together of Friends from the fringes of the various branches, particularly younger Read More

  • Response: Forgiveness and Letting-Go: An Inter-Religious and Internal Dialogue Sallie B. King

    Sallie B. King I thank Claire Ly for giving the interview, “Forgiveness: a journey or an obligation?” in which she shares her reflections upon her experience under the Khmer Rouge regime. Read More

  • Love and Peace in Cuba Today From the Perspective of a Quaker

    By Julio Antonio Cuesta Martínez(Translated From the Spanish byStephen W. Angell) Introduction By Stephen Angell, Associate Editor I met Julio Cuesta in Gibara, Cuba, in January, 2014, during the Fourth Encounter of the Cuban Quaker Institute for Peace. I was teaching courses there on Quakers and the Bible and Peace; and Quakers and Mysticism and…

  • “From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657-1761″*

    Reviewed by H. Larry Ingle The British literary scholar Brycchan Carey avers in the first sentence of his Introduction to From Peace to Freedom, “almost everyone knows that Quakers were at the forefront of campaigns to abolish slavery Read More

  • “Following Jesus: The Heart of Faith and Practice”* A Review

    Reviewed by George Amoss Jr. Paul Anderson is Professor of Biblical and Quaker Studies at George Fox University). His Following Jesus: The Heart of Faith and Practice is a collection of 36 essays, some of which had appeared in earlier forms in Evangelical Read More

  • “Paper Trail: Writings from the Front Line of Peace Action, Quaker House/Fort Bragg, 2001-2012″* A Review

    Reviewed by John Kiriako This is an eminently readable first-person account of a daily fight for peace during what is arguably the most militarily active period of the past two generations. First, the reader should know what the book is NOT. It is not anti-military. (In fact, Read More

  • “Remaking Friends: How Progressive Friends Changed Quakerism & Helped Save America, 1822-1940″* A Review

    Reviewed by Isaac May In his introduction to Remaking Read More

  • “Angels of Progress: A Documentary History of the Progressive Friends: Radical Quakers in a Turbulent America”* Reviewed

    Reviewed by Stephen W. Angell Read More

  • An Excerpt from Remaking Friends: How Progressive Friends Changed Quakerism & Helped Save America, 1822-1940

    By Chuck Fager FIVE: “Oh! No, It Cannot, Cannot Be – My Darling Babe Will Live . . .” As we turn to spiritualism, it is worth recalling that in one sense, there was not much new about these soon-notorious manifestations. “It would be possible,” wrote Rufus Read More

  • Editor’s Introduction, #24

    Chuck Fager We are very pleased to publish, in this issue, the oldest piece of original theological writing so far (157 years) by our oldest contributor, who clocks in at the ripe age of 205. Or at least, she would be that age if she hadn’t died in 1879. The author in question is none…

  • The Fall of Man

    Angelina Weld Grimke From the Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends, 1859, pp. 45-52. Eagleswood, N.J., April 26, 1857 To the Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends: I remember that, some time ago, one of your number wrote to ask me for something Read More

  • “Let the holy seed of life reign” Perfection, Pelagianism, and the early Friends

    John Connell Introduction “For this was the error of Pelagius, which we indeed reject and abhor, and which the Fathers deservedly withstood, that man by his natural strength, without the help of God’s grace, could attain to that state so as not to sin.” – Robert Read More

  • Blessed Unrest: The Radical Act of Gathering

    Scott Holmes          I am a Quaker lawyer finding myself in the middle of the legal defense of Quakers arrested for failing to disperse from an unlawful assembly at the North Carolina General Assembly during the “Moral Monday” protests this summer. I have been inspired, moved, Read More

  • Separation Accomplished: New Beginnings for a New Association of Friends and a “Reconfigured” Indiana Yearly Meeting

    By Stephen W. Angell The disagreement became so sharp that they parted company; Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus. But Paul chose Silas and set out, the believers commending him to the grace of the Lord. He went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches. – Acts Read More

  • A Letter re: Kenya Quakers & Homosexuality

    by David Zarembka Dear Quaker Theology, I read with interest the various comments on the homosexuality issue in Kenya in the last issue of Quaker Theology [Issue #23]. I have some additional comments that might help clarify the situation. I was at the FWCC [Friends Read More

  • “The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies”*

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies Too Expensive Advice to Meetings: Don’t buy this book. The full retail price is $175, and Amazon only knocks it down to $128.48; even its paper-free Kindle edition is $99.99. That’s just too much for one book. In these times, it’s likely more than many Meetings…

  • Northwest Yearly Meeting and “Shattering” Conflict: Chapter One

    Chuck Fager with Jade Souza With the schism in Indiana Yearly Meeting over one meeting’s open welcome to LGBT persons now complete, one could have thought this journal would have a break from coverage of such events. But it was not to be. In July 2013, another American Friends church, this time in an Read…

  • About the Contributors, #24

    Stephen Angell is the Leatherock Professor of Quaker Studies at Earlham School of Religion, Richmond Indiana, and Associate Editor of Quaker Theology. John Connell currently resides in Camby, Indiana. He is a birthright Friend and a member of White Lick Monthly Read More

  • Progressive Friends: The Top Ten Reasons Why They’re The Most Interesting Quakers We Never Heard Of

    Chuck Fager (Adapted from a presentation at the Conference of Quaker Historians & Archivists, Sixth Month 2012) I want to say a few things about the 19th century Progressive Friends as a movement.     Ten things, to be exact. Few Quakers today are familiar with this yeasty group. Read More

  • The Battle for Battle Creek: Sectarian Competition in the Yankee West

    Brian C. Wilson Battle Creek, Michigan, is famous as the 19th-century headquarters of Seventh-Day Adventism and its prophet, Ellen White, as well as for the Adventist-­inspired Battle Creek Sanitarium, superintended for years by the dynamic John Harvey Kellogg. Battle Read More

  • “The Early Quakers and the Kingdom of God: Peace, Testimony and Revolution”*

    Reviewed by H. Larry Ingle This hefty work serves to introduce Australian Friend Gerard Guiton to the Quaker scholarly world concerned with the origins of the Religious Society of Friends. It is heralded with sparkling back cover endorsements by three Read More

  • “Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950″*

    Reviewed by H. Larry Ingle Friends often are at their best when they have visible opponents who are deeply entrenched, respectable, and powerful but support some odious practice – think slaveholders. But the reality is that partially through dramatic Quaker pre-Civil War and wartime Read More

  • Editor’s Introduction #23

    I     As this issue took shape, much of the world was keeping vigil while Nelson Mandela, the liberator of South Africa, seemed to be finishing the course of his dramatic, 94-year life pilgrimage.     As a statesman, Mandela’s greatest achievement Read More

  • Introduction to Issue #22

    This issue is the largest we have ever published. It wasn’t planned that way: good stuff just kept coming in. And it covers a wide range of topics and concerns, from Quaker peace work in Kenya, to the theological character of a recent award-winning novel Read More

  • Studying Music and Violence

    Heidi Hart The souls of all my dears have flown to the stars. Thank God there’s no one left for me to lose – so I am free to cry. This air was made for the echoing of songs. –Anna Akhmatova, Russian poet, 1944 Random cannonfire punctures the sound-space in Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory. Wagner’s Ring…

  • “An Excerpt from Howard and Anna Brinton: Re-inventors of Quakerism In the Twentieth Century, An Interpretive Biography”*

    By Anthony Manousos Growing Up in “Brinton Country” To tell the story of the Brintons or of the Beans and the Coxes, Anna’s family, is to tell the story of Quakerism as it developed in America. Anna and Howard both took pride in the fact that they could trace their ancestry to the early days…

  • Questions for Howard: Being a Kind of Review of the New Biography of Howard & Anna Brinton

    By Chuck Fager “The time has come–indeed, it is long overdue–for a critical assessment of Howard’s major works: Friends for Three Hundred Years (1952) and Guide to Quaker Practice (1943), which continue to be best sellers among liberal Friends.” –Anthony Manousos in Howard Read More

  • “A Peace of Africa, Reflections on Life In The Great Lakes Region”

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager In the US, the career track for “development work” is pretty well laid out: it starts with a degree from a “quality” college. Season that with a bit of “on the ground” foreign experience (the Peace Corps will do). From there, snag a slot at Read More