Quaker Theology

7. Modern Quaker Thinking

  • What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living

    NYTimes Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind. By Phoebe Zerwick — March 12, 2024 Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense Read More

  • The Authenticity of Liberal Quakerism

    By Chuck Fager In a Quaker theology discussion in which I took part, the following question was posed: “How, in light of the divergence in practice and belief between liberal and evangelical Quakers, can we both rightfully claim to be Friends?” Here I will consider Read More

  • 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

  • Consensus Statement from A Seminar in Quaker Theology

    Seminar participants worked in small groups an various theological issues, and produced brief statements which expressed their present convictions. These statements, which met with a broad degree of agreement, have been combined here as a “consensus document.” This is a provisional, working statement, useful for further discussion and study, and is not to be confused…

  • Friends’ Ecclesiology and The Quaker-Wide Web

    Ecclesiology, the nature of the church, is a bubbling issue among American Friends today, at least of the unprogrammed variety. Almost anywhere you care to look, Yearly Meetings are struggling with their structures, worrying about staff or no staff, laying down or propping up committees, taking corporate sabbaticals, and so forth. This is a very…

  • Beyond the Age of Amnesia

    Charting the Course of 20th Century Liberal Quaker Theology. I call this recent period of progressive Quaker history the Age of Amnesia, an unarticulated sense that Quakerism was effectively invented just a few weeks before thee and me started attending meeting.

  • Friends as a “Chosen People”

    An Examination of Contemporary Quaker Identity, by Chuck Fager.

  • “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 Read More

  • Encounters from Beyond Quakerism, Belief in Extraterrestrials And the Boundaries of Liberal Religion

    Isaac May Readers of Friends Journal, the leading periodical of liberal Quakerism, would have been surprised in early 1994 to see a small ad placed in the classifieds section in the back of the magazine. Amidst blurbs for Quaker-related Bed and Breakfasts, Read More

  • “A Convergent Model of Renewal: Remixing the Quaker Tradition in a Participatory Culture”*

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager There’s more than little déjà vu about A Convergent Model of Renewal. Quakerism, Wess Daniels argues, will be renewed by the coming together of Friends from the fringes of the various branches, particularly younger Read More

  • Response: Forgiveness and Letting-Go: An Inter-Religious and Internal Dialogue Sallie B. King

    Sallie B. King I thank Claire Ly for giving the interview, “Forgiveness: a journey or an obligation?” in which she shares her reflections upon her experience under the Khmer Rouge regime. Read More

  • “The Evolutionary Potential of Quakerism” Revisited From Kenneth Boulding to John Bellers

    Keith Helmuth Based on presentations made for the Quaker Studies Programme, Canadian Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends 2009 Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. – Vaclav Havel Part One Quaker Memes and the Human…

  • “Godless For God’s Sake: Nontheism In Contemporary Quakerism”* — A Review

    What have we come to in Friends religious thought, when the most exciting book of Quaker theology I’ve read in years is produced by a bunch of Quaker non-theists–twenty-seven in all?

  • 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,…

  • “If Grace Be True: Why God Will Save Every Person*” and “A Treatise on Atonement*” Reviewed

    Reviewed by Chuck Fager Dissident Quaker Meetings in Indiana Almost two hundred years ago, Hosea Ballou foretold what would befall two Quaker pastors in Indiana, Philip Gulley and his good friend James Mulholland, in 2002: To profess universal salvation,” Ballou wrote, “will subject some to excommunication from regular churches; Read More

  • Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog

    A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle State Authority Over the Individual 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 Read More