Quaker Theology

Historical Progressive Quakerism

  • Editor’s Introduction by Chuck Fager

    To be candid, I’m not accustomed to being consulted by Evangelical Friends. I’m not one, and over the past forty years, I’ve often found myself on opposite sides from many vocal or leading Evangelicals. Nevertheless, I’ve learned things from Evangelicals, and on good Read More

  • 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 Read More

  • 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 Read…

  • 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 Read More

  • 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 Read…

  • 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 Read More

  • 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…

  • 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 Read More

  • 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.

  • Quaker Theology is not Explained by Apocalyptic Expectation and Delay

    BY HUGH ROC Introduction Douglas Gwyn’s thesis (Gwyn, 1986) that Quaker theology originates in imminent apocalyptic expectation has achieved a degree of influence. In its own right, Gwyn’s work stands as an expression of passionate personal conviction. Gwyn makes an empathetic Read More

  • A Review, “Personality and Place, the Life & Times of Pendle Hill”

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager “Sometimes I look around and think, Pendle Hill is God’s little joke on the Society of Friends.” – Janet Shepherd, former Dean NOTE: From one perspective, it’s a conflict of interest for me to review this book. After all, I’m described in Read More

  • “From Personality & Place”* An Excerpt

    Douglas Gwyn In Pendle Hill’s Upmeads library hangs a print of Edward Hicks’ The Peaceable Kingdom. Hicks (1780–1849) was a noted Quaker minister who lived in Newtown, Pennsylvania (about 45 miles northeast of Pendle Hill). He was Read More

  • An Excerpt from Remaking Friends: How Progressive Friends Changed Quakerism & Helped Save America, 1822-1940

    By Chuck Fager FIVE: “Oh! No, It Cannot, Cannot Be – My Darling Babe Will Live . . .” As we turn to spiritualism, it is worth recalling that in one sense, there was not much new about these soon-notorious manifestations. “It would be possible,” wrote Rufus Read More

  • “Let the holy seed of life reign” Perfection, Pelagianism, and the early Friends

    John Connell Introduction “For this was the error of Pelagius, which we indeed reject and abhor, and which the Fathers deservedly withstood, that man by his natural strength, without the help of God’s grace, could attain to that state so as not to sin.” – Robert Read More

  • “350 Years of the Society of Friends in North America: 1661-2011″*

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager Want to see all US Quaker history in a single page? With attitude? Here it is. Well, one very large page: thirty by forty inches. It’s actually a chart, meant to hang on your wall, not nestle among the pamphlets on a bookshelf. Read More

  • Postscript: Allen Jay on the Spirit of Separation

    Joshua Brown, pastor of West Richmond Meeting, is also the editor of a new edition of the Autobiography of Allen Jay (1831-1910). Jay, an Indiana Friend, was a successful revivalist during the late nineteenth century, as the Gurneyite branch of Read More

  • “A History of Southland College: The Society of Friends and Black Education in Arkansas,”* A Review

    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 Read More

  • 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 Read More

  • 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 Read More

  • 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 Read More

  • “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…

  • “Seeking Paradise: The Spirit of the Shaker”* Reviewed

    Reviewed by Robert Pierson “The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair,” wrote Thomas Merton, “is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.” (p.85) Seeking Paradise reflects the Trappist monk’s Read More

  • Silence in Heaven: The Revelation to John Woolman

    We might call theology a conversation between present and past. Theology seeks to address contemporary concerns but does so as part of a historical community. So we look to our communal elders of ages past and to their gathered wisdom as a resource for our own theological work.

  • “Wrestling With Our Faith Tradition”* A Review

    A review of Conservative Quakerism on the Rise

  • Taking Up Niebuhr’s Irony: Living a Theological Saga: Review Essay

    Six Books by Gary Dorrien Published by Westminster John Knox, Louisville: The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. 2001, 494 pages. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism & Modernity, 1900-1950. 2003, 666 pages. The Word As True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology. 1997, 287 pages. The Remaking of Evangelical Theology. 1998,…

  • Messiahs of Every Age: A Theological Basis of Nineteenth-Century Social Reform

    Priscilla Elaine Eppinger At the age of 87 Lucretia Mott attended the 1880 Philadelphia Quaker Yearly Meeting. The representative committee reported that although the issue of temperance had been before them, the “way did not open for them to take Read More

  • Nimrod and the Tower of Babel: Genesis 10-11 in Seventeenth-Century Quaker Writings

    By Esther Greenleaf Murer This paper grows out of the Quaker Bible Index, an attempt at a comprehensive Scripture index to make readily available Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century Quaker writings. The first version, which appeared in 1993 and is available on CD-ROM, included about Read More

  • Quaker History & Theology: Three Interviews

    By Chuck Fager Editor’s Introduction: In Tenth Month 2002, some very interesting people gathered at Swarthmore College for a Conference on George Fox’s Legacy. Numerous papers were delivered, many of which will be published presently in Quaker History, the journal Read More

  • “Catechism and Confession of Faith,”* by Robert Barclay, A Review

    Reviewed by Thomas D. Paxson, Jr. Many who come to the Religious Society of Friends are not introduced in any systematic way to the scriptural passages which most spoke to the experience of early Friends, which strengthened them in their faith and helped them keep to the Light. Nor is Read More

  • Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834-1909) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): A Quaker Influence on Modern English Literature

    By Alison M. Lewis, Ph.D. Caroline Emelia Stephen has enjoyed a long-standing reputation among Friends as a Quaker theologian. Quaker Strongholds (1891) is considered a “Quaker classic;” one hundred years after its first publication, Friends General Read More

  • 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 Read More

  • 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 Read More

  • Puritanism, Spiritualism, and Quakerism:

    AN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY Melvin B. Endy, Jr. The problems posed by the attempt to define Puritanism have driven some scholars to substituting description for definition and others to the use of the term as an umbrella for the religious experience shared by groups as disparate as mildly dissatisfied Read More