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 #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 five major points: Intellectualizing about religion takes people away from experiencing …

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 in how intellectual principles structure our thought …

George Fox Among Christian Mystics

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 …

First Thoughts on Sixteenth Century Spanish Mysticism and the First Quakers: Communion with The Light in Early Modernism

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 …

A Review: Among Friends, A Consultation with Friends about the Condition of Quakers in the U.S. Today. An Earlham School of Religion Report. 294 pp., paperback, 1999.

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 …

An Exchange: Quaker Theology Without God?

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”: …

About the Contributors

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 …