A Progressive Journal and Forum for Discussion and Study
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. Wilmington Yearly Meeting includes Friends Churches in the states of Tennessee and Ohio, and …
Continue reading “Moment of Truth: Wilmington Yearly Meeting Divides over a Familiar Set of Issues”
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 disagreement in that yearly meeting over a …
Continue reading “Wilmington YM: Another Yearly Meeting Schism?”
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, George Fox …
Continue reading “George Fox University and West Hills Friends:”
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 …
Continue reading “Love and Peace in Cuba Today From the Perspective of a Quaker”
Reviewed by Stephen W. Angell Angels of Progress: A Documentary History of the Progressive Friends is part of a two-volume set published by Kimo Press. While they are not formally numbered, what I regard as the first volume, Remaking Friends: How Progressive Friends Changed Quakerism & Helped Save America, reviewed elsewhere in this issue by Isaac May, …
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 15:39-41 (NRSV). Has a …
By Stephen W. Angell Editor’s Introduction September 11th. Is there a more ominous date on the contemporary American calendar? Now, 9-11 has become a landmark date for Indiana Yearly Meeting (IYM), in a manner eerily reminiscent of its traumatic meaning for society at large. On September 11, 2012, IYM Meetings were notified that the long …
Continue reading “The Proposed Split of Indiana Yearly Meeting: What Its Monthly Meetings Say”
By Stephen W. Angell As we reported in Issues #18 (Fall-Winter 2010-2011) and #19 (Spring-Summer 2011), Indiana Yearly Meeting, after anguished discussion in an all-day Representative Council Meeting on October 1, 2011, agreed on a year-long process of “Deliberative/Collaborative Reconfiguration.” The roots of this momentous decision lay in a minute, approved in June of 2008, …
Continue reading “The Impending Split in Indiana Yearly Meeting”
Indiana Yearly Meeting’s Troubled Relationship With West Richmond Monthly Meeting By Stephen W. Angell “There is a common misperception that West Richmond is a limb that is being lopped off. That is not the spirit of the recommendation of the Indiana Yearly Meeting task force. We’re trying to help out the meetings that don’t fit.” …
Stephen W. Angell Part I: Freight Train Bearing Down? West Richmond Friends Meeting and Indiana Yearly Meeting West Richmond Friends Meeting in Richmond, Indiana, might seem to be an odd ground zero for the newest intra-Quaker conflict, but that is where the Meeting has found itself in the past two years, after approving a “welcoming …
Continue reading “Two Current Conflicts in Midwestern Friends Meetings”
Reviewed by Stephen Angell Thomas C. Kennedy is probably the most significant historian of Quakerism writing today that most American Quakers have never heard of. He has recently retired from the history faculty of the University of Arkansas. Most of his research has involved British pacifists. His British Quakerism, 1860-1920: The Transformation of a Religious …
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 Ministry (Friends United Press, 2004), which presents first-hand …
Continue reading ““To Be Broken and Tender: A Quaker Theology for Today”* A Review”
By Stephen W. Angell In 1955, the inaugural year of the Friends Journal, a special issue was published on the theme of the Wider Quaker Fellowship. One of the essays in that issue was excerpted from Deep River, a forthcoming book by Howard Thurman (1899-1981), eminent Christian African American mystical and social gospel theologian, preacher, …
By Stephen W. Angell From East Africa to the Midwestern United States, the first decade of the twenty-first century has proven to be a momentous time for the Religious Society of Friends. In Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting, to which I belong, Friends have been discussing whether our minute on environmental sustainability should include the concept …
Why they were written in the first place, what was contained in them, what use was made of them, And what we can learn from them today By Stephen W. Angell Catechisms are out of fashion in the twenty-first century, perhaps because of a perceived rigidity or undue conformity that seems to many to be …
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 …