Volume Fifteen, Number One
Spring-Summer 2016
Editor: Chuck Fager
Associate Editor: Steven Angell & Ann K. Riggs
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, #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 often seem unbridgeable, but which grace and attention sometimes cross. Three further entries deal with death: …

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, North …

Tom Fox Speaks For Himself: Excerpts from His Blog/Journal

Remembering Margaret Hassan Tom – Monday, November 15, 2004 “Giving material goods can help people. If food is needed and we can give it, we do that. If shelter is needed, or books or medicine is needed, and we can give them, we do that. As best we can, we can care for whoever needs …

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 he loved making music.
And he loved peace. Tom Fox was a peacemaker. (Read more)

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 at that time …

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, her voice and charisma still filled rooms, and …

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 to the Memory garden was open, even though the weather was …

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 in a blink. For some, there …

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 the rest of …

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 lacks its own term for this, and so we must borrow the notion of …

“One Yellow Door: A Memoir of Love and Loss, Faith and Infidelity”* A Review

Reflections by Alice Carlton This memoir tells the heart-wrenching story of a marriage brought through dark days over a decade from 1984 to 1996 due to the husband’s illness with Lewy Body Dementia. What an awful disease. It took him, an Anglican priest, in and out of lucidity with unpredictable fluctuations. It is often confused …

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 of a moment Saturdayྭmorning, November 7, 2015. …

About the Contributors, #28

Ken Bradstock has been a U.S. Marine, a deputy sheriff, and for many years, a hospice counselor. He is also the Clerk of Fancy Gap Friends meeting in Ararat, Virginia. Alice Carlton is a writer and a member of Chapel Hill Friends Meeting in North Carolina. She has worked for many years as an Imago relationship therapist. …