ONE: “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 J. William Frost published a scholarly examination of the group’s early history. In his second paragraph, Frost stressed that …

TWO: 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 Friends Service Committee.     A fairly recent convinced Friend, in 1976 …

THREE: The American Friends Service Committee, 1947-49: The Cold War’s Effect

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 examines the choices it faced on such …

FOUR: 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 far …

FIVE: “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; they probably did not intend to, but nevertheless …

TEN: 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 Gilbert White developed about the direction and governance of the American Friends Service …

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 …

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 must, the reaction of our forbears to the …

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 …

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, a part of the Hicksite …

“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 and the slave trade.” In the small world of scholarship, especially the historical realm, that assessment may be accurate …

“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 pressure, President Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery 150 years ago this year. …

“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 distinguished Friends of a programmed orientation, recorded ministers all, Douglas Gwyn, Englishman John Punshon, and …

“America’s Providential History, Including Biblical Principles of Education, Government, Politics, Economics, and Family Life,”* A Review

Reviewed by H. Larry Ingle At a superficial level, America’s Providential History seems to be a textbook: a large format paperback, it looks like a text; it has the feel of one; and it has wide enough margins for the interested student to make copious notes on its pages. Moreover, the authors claim, in the …

Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog

A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle State Authority Over the Individual 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 this …