Search

It’s the end of July. The community of Anaheim is outraged.  In separate incidents over the past few days, two unarmed men of color have been murdered by the police.  A round of public protests and police suppression of protests have followed. I have just returned to Southern California in the middle of this turmoil.   I make plans to meet with my affinity group and head to a rally at the Anaheim police station.

Looking towards the future of Quakerism, we see that the power to rekindle our fire for social justice lies within our local meetings. Supporting individuals to pursue the spirit’s leadings to work for peace and social justice will strengthen the Religious Society of Friends overall and connect us back to our historical roots.

The Mission Field of Washington DC

Dear Editor: Whoever wrote the passage boxed on page 10 of the last issue, I have no idea, but I do know that it was not Shakespeare. Not only is there no play into which that speech would fit, but the key words – patriotic, patriotism, and citizenry – are words he never used anywhere, as reference to a concordance makes quickly clear.

In response to Harvard University’s refusal to divest from its fossil fuel stock, a recent mayor of Seattle, Mike McGinn, commented, “[pullquote]We're the first generation to see the effects of climate change, and the last generation who can do anything about it.[/pullquote] To refuse to use every tool at our disposal in this fight – to embrace inaction – is to endorse a trajectory that will lead to suffering, privation, and calamity. We owe it to those who our institutions and investments serve and will serve in the future to do everything we can to prevent this crisis.” With an unprecedented drought ongoing throughout the West, we might be directly experiencing this crisis already.

Dear Friends: Stand up straight. Those words can sound scolding – or they can sound encouraging. Deciding whether or not to obey directions, we consider the source. We consider whether we think that source cares about our best interests.

Bill Durland is one of our Quaker treasures. His vast knowledge in the fields of politics, theology, economics. philosophy, and government inform his new book, The Demise of American Democracy: Explaining the Crisis and What to Do about It. The book is further enriched by Durland’s personal stories, including seminal childhood events that led to his awakening to injustices, his time in the Virginia Legislature working for social justice, and his time as a Catholic and a Quaker.

Paranoid, a 2016 British conspiracy thriller available on Netflix, has Quakerism as one of its themes. In this eight-part series, a team of detectives investigates a murder and a deadly conspiracy. One of the detectives is a man in his sixties who becomes romantically involved with a Quaker, also in her sixties. Another character calls her a “Quaker sex bomb” (three words that are not often heard together). After the start of this relationship, the detective begins attending meeting for worship. The show presents a nuanced perspective on older adult sexuality, and portrays Quakerism sympathetically and accurately. The scenes of meeting for worship were shot in the Frandley Quaker Meeting House in Cheshire, England, and members of this meeting were used as extras. Only three reviews of Paranoid have appeared on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, but they are all positive. ~~~

My first job at the American Friends Service Committee was in 1965, when Self-Help Enterprises was being created. This was also my first real experience working with white people, as opposed to working for them, although at the tender age of nineteen, I still did not realize that. I have gone through many emotions – some even tearful – as I recalled my youth and my work while writing this article. As the daughter of a farmworker, I have been confronted with the typical things around racism, feminism, classism, etc., during my youth and into my adult life. It was, in fact, not too many years ago when I decided not to let those things rule my life.

The following text is an abridged version of a longer article found at westernfriend.org/media/spiritual-reconstruction-unabridged.

An interview with Ray Lyall

How peaceful it is to take an evening walk along Grand Avenue in Mancos, a little community of fourteen hundred people, nestled in the Mancos Valley of southwest Colorado! The sunset’s glow is reflected off the La Plata Mountains to the east, and shadows begin to shroud Mesa Verde in the west.

When the English composer Solomon Eccles became a Quaker around 1665, he sold or gave away all his musical instruments and all his printed music. Then, fearful that by doing so he had led the recipients morally astray, he bought everything back, carried it to the top of London’s Temple Hill, stomped it to pieces, and set it all on fire.