This double issue is an effort to recover some momentum that’s been lost in the past year. The last issue, #29, appeared almost eighteen months ago. Yet our “mission statement” on the copyright page says our intention is to publish two issues per year. And we’ve kept up that pace fairly closely since beginning in …
Category Archives: Issue #30 & #31 — Winter-Spring 2017 & Summer-Fall 2017
Is There Life after Death in Quaker North Carolina?
Chuck Fager Demolishing a 320-Year-Old Meeting At 10:58 Eastern time, Seventh Day (Saturday), Eighth Month (August) 5, 2017, at Quaker Lake Camp near Liberty, NC, Clerk Michael Fulp asked, “Do you approve?” The assembled Friends, about 120 of them, responded with a surprisingly subdued, “Approve.” And with that, they pressed the button that …
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An Increasingly Familiar Story: Northwest Yearly Meeting Expulsions & Sequelae
Chuck Fager We’ve also been following the growing tensions in Northwest Yearly Meeting, out west (see Issue #24:, Issue #27 ; and Issue #28 ). In January 2017, these tensions came to a head when the YM leadership announced a purge of several meetings that had adopted LGBT-affirming positions or minutes. The leadership framed this as a …
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Wilmington YM: Another Yearly Meeting Schism?
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 …
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Lucretia Mott & The Perils of Dissent – Excerpts from James & Lucretia Mott, Life & Letters.
Anna Davis Hallowell. Boston Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1884 1860: “[The black abolitionist] Robert Purvis has said that I was “the most belligerent non-resistant he ever saw.” I accept the character he gives me; and I glory in it. I have no idea, because I am a non-resistant, of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on …
Joseph Southall & The Ghosts of the Slain:
A Quaker Artist Takes on World War One Editor’s Note: Joseph Southall (1861-1944) was a successful British artist, who was at the peak of his renown and productivity when World War One began. A lifelong Quaker pacifist and socialist, he set aside much of his conventional work to make drawings of protest against the …
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“Many Friends Do Not Know ‘Where They Are'”: Some Divisions in London Yearly Meeting During the First World War”
Reprinted from Quaker Theology #11, 2005Thomas C. Kennedyauthor of British Quakerism 1860-1920 Late in 2001 in the terrible aftermath of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, Scott Simon, newsman and commentator for National Public Radio who claims membership in the Society of Friends, presented solemn public testimony in which he declared that because of the …
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 …
Everyday/Extraordinary Resistance: Two True Stories from the Vietnam Years
Leafleting a Meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marion Anderson By 1970, I had been organizing against the war full-time for five years. First, in Washington where I was an organizer of the televised National Teach-In which was watched by about ten million Americans and then in Michigan as chairman of Michi-gan Clergy and …
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Jim Corbett, Sanctuary Prophet of Post-Desert Quakerism
Chuck Fager Friend Jim Corbett, of Pima Meeting in Tucson, died on his Arizona ranch August 2, 2001 after a short illness. He was 67. With his passing a quiet giant of Quaker resistance departed. He was a founder of the 1980s Sanctuary movement, which helped save many Latin American refugees from the bloody, …
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Remembering Tom Fox Introduction to: Tom Fox Was My Friend. Yours, Too.
Chuck Fager Christian Peacemakers Kidnapped in Baghdad John Stephens called me with the news: Tom Fox and three other members of the Christian peacemaker Teams’ group (CPT) in Baghdad had been kidnaped. It was just after Thanksgiving, late November, 2005. That summer of 2005 John had been an intern at Quaker House in Fayetteville, …
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Passages by Tom Fox & James Loney
1. From James Loney Easter 2006 For 118 days we lay in a tomb – Norman Kember, Harmeet Sooden and me. Tom Fox too, for 104 days, until he was murdered in the early morning hours of March 9. Our tomb was a 10-ft.-by-10-ft. room. How I came to hate every single detail of …
Passages from the Qur’an
2:155-156: And certainly, we shall test you with something of fear; hunger; loss of wealth, lives and fruits, but give glad tidings to the patient ones, who, when afflicted with calamity say, ‘Truly! To Allah we belong and truly, to Him we shall return.’ 2:216; It may be that you dislike a thing …
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 …
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The Quaker Peace Testimony as Questing Beast
The 1995 Roundtable was sponsored by the Pendle Hill Issues Program, for which I was then the coordinator. I asked Chel to prepare an overview of the Quaker Peace Testimony, because I was looking, quite frankly, for “new talent” and new thinking in the field.
Study War Some More (If You Want to Work for Peace)
Chuck Fager Introduction Why a study on Quaker peace strategy? From some current perspectives, laboring over the stra-tegy and history of Quaker peace work is a curiosity, if not a waste of time. Larger and more influential groups are at work on peace issues, especially in Washington DC; isn’t our main role is to support …
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“No Country for Jewish Liberals,” “The Half Life of a Free Radical”* Two Reviews
Reviewed by Chuck Fager These two autobiographical memoirs should be much more different. They ended up in a stack of books by my recliner, and I was soon struck by a kind of spiritual resonance and counterpoint between them, across seemingly vast gaps of culture and personality. Neither is by or about a Quaker. But …
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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 …
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The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist
Reviewed by Stephen Angell A Review of Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. $26.95, hardback. Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh, has published many excellent volumes with African and Afro-diaspora themes, including The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, …
Excerpts from: ALL SLAVE-KEEPERS That keep the Innocent in Bondage, APOSTATES
Pretending to lay claim to the Pure & Holy Christian Religion; of what Congregation so ever; but especially in their Ministers, by whose example the filthy Leprosy and Apostacy is spread far and near; it is a notorious Sin, which many of the true Friends of Christ, and his pure Truth, called Quakers, has been …
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“Ham Sok Hon: Voice of the People and Pioneer of Religious Pluralism in Twentieth Century Korea; Biography of a Korean Quaker”* A Review
Reviewed by Chuck Fager Reprinted from Quaker Theology #5, Autumn 2001 Early in the morning of Second Month 4, 1989, Kim Sung Soo learned that Ham Sok Hon had died. “When I looked at him in his coffin,” Kim writes, “I felt it was as if a part of myself had died. Faced with his death my …
Review Essay: Resistance Theology in Niebuhr, Barth, Rauschenbush & Dorrien; Irony & Living a Theological Saga
Reviewed by Chuck Fager Adapted from Quaker Theology #11 – Spring-Summer 2005 Six Books by Gary Dorrien, published by Westminster John Knox, Louisville: The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. 2001. 494 pges.. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism & Modernity, 1900-1950. 2003, 666 pages. …
About the Contributors, #30-31
Marion Anderson (1932-2002) was the founder and director of Employment Research Associates,which prepared reports critical of defense spending. The Washington Post wrote that her work “reverberated through Washington because of extensive press coverage of her reports and testimony before congressional committees.” Their research showed “that huge increases to the military’s budget came at the expense of …