Volume Nine, Number One
Editor: Chuck Fager
Associate Editor: Ann K. Riggs & Steven Angell
ISSN 1526-7482

All the essays in this issue
are copyright © by the respective authors,
and all rights are reserved by them.

The views expressed in articles in Quaker Theology are those of the authors, and not necessarily those of the Editors, or Quaker Ecumenical Seminars in Theology.

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 the first …

Update & Preview Philip Gulley, Western Yearly Meeting, And An Excerpt from His Forthcoming Book

Six years ago, in Quaker Theology, Issue #9, we reported on the effort to revoke the ministerial credentials of Friend Philip Gulley, the pastor of Fairfield Friends Meeting near Indianapolis, Indiana. Fairfield is part of Western Yearly Meeting, which encompasses the western half of the state. The charge was heresy, specifically that Gulley had espoused …

The Quaker Enterprise of Metaphor

By Jnana Hodson In early Quaker usage, metaphor engages far more than its definition as a figure of speech would presuppose. The central overlapping images – principally Light and Seed, linked to a concept of Truth – advance a complex logic grounded in an outpouring of spiritual experiences by many individuals. Given the constraints established …

Narrative Theology: from Psychological Warfare to Peace; My journey to/into Quakerism and nonviolence

Jeanne-Henriette Louis My Ph.D. dissertation on the concepts of psychological warfare in the United States during the Second World War originated in the need to investigate the period corresponding to the first years of my life (I was born in 1938) but also to an extremely painful part of world history. I was teaching North …

Howard Thurman and Quakers

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, …

Response to Thomas Hamm: Holiness 2.5 Cheers

Carole Dale Spencer First of all, I want to dismiss any notions that my book was in any way an attack on Hamm’s Transformation of American Quakerism. While we disagree on a few issues, his work was an important catalyst for the beginning of my exploration of holiness and Quakers almost twenty years ago. I …

Thomas Hamm Response to “Holiness, The Soul of Quakerism”*

Holiness: 2.5 CheersThomas Hamm, Earlham College Thomas Hamm Those of us in the little world of Quaker historians have long known that this book was coming. I got an inkling in 1990, when the Conference of Quaker Historians and Archivists was held at George Fox College and Carole Spencer presented a paper on women and …

“Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism”*

Reviewed by Chuck Fager It was the British historian John Punshon who told a large Quaker body in 2008 that: . . . one way of studying the Quaker past is to use it as a means of self-justification. At times, interpretations of our history have been produced that have been used in the doctrinal …

“Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship, Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice”* A Review

Reviewed by Chuck Fager Winston Churchill was once told, regarding another politician, that “Mr. X is a very modest man.” “Yes,” Churchill replied, “but then, Mr. X has much to be modest about.” Several times during eight years in North Carolina, I have been introduced as a Quaker to black persons of substance, mostly ministers. …

About the Contributors, #16

Stephen W. Angell, is Leatherock Professor of Quaker Studies at Earlham School of Religion. Chuck Fager, Editor of Quaker Theology, is Director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Philip Gulley is pastor of Fairfield Friends Meeting in Camby, Indiana. Among his books is a series, “Front Porch Tales,” and If Grace Is True. Thomas …