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For Friends like me who fall, more or less, into the Isolated Friend category, where one must lean more on the faith and less the practice of Friends, books like this are manna from Heaven….

New Quaker Youth book off press. “Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices” celebrates, critiques, questions, and reflects on the Quaker faith experience.

During their nearly fifty years of marriage, Howard and Anna Brinton exemplified what it meant to be a committed Quaker couple—teaching, writing, traveling and working for peace while raising a…

Great piece:

How come the rest of the church is taken up with missional or emerging church as if it were something new? We are only doing what the apostles did two thousand years ago, and what the regular old Christian in the street did – helped the neighbour, fed the poor, nursed the sick, visited the imprisoned, clothed the naked…

I’ve been reading John P. Bowen’s book Evangelism for “Normal” People, (Augsburg Fortress 2002). What is “normal” evangelism? Not approaching strangers with “Are you saved?” or handing out leaflets on street corners! It’s living peacefully, helping our neighbours, reaching out to those in need, and generally following Christian principles. It’s taking some risks when people question us about faith. It’s being bold in witness, but in witnessing with love.

On Archive.org. Disregard its listing as Orthodox, this is the Hicksite version. The “Book of Discipline” is more commonly known as “Faith and Practice” these days and is the most official document of Friends beliefs for the region & group it serves. I love the handwritten note on the inside back cover, which is a copied passage on Friends from Rufus Jones. Via Chris Pifer on a Facebook thread.

Archive.org has a lot of Quaker material, some originally scanned by Google, so it should be there too.

It has been said that wisdom is perishable. Unlike information or knowledge, it cannot be stored in a computer or recorded in a book. It expires with each passing generation. Elders who are truly…

Dusting off the Elders of Balby

One of the blueprints for Quaker community is the “Epistle from the Elders at Balby” written in 1656 at the very infancy of the Friends movement by a gathering of leaders from Yorkshire and North Midlands, England.

It’s the precursor to Faith and Practice, as it outlines the relationship between individuals and the meeting. If remembered at all today, it’s for its postscript, a paraphrase of 2 Corinthians that warns readers not to treat this as a form to worship and to remain living in the light which is pure and holy. That postscript now starts off most liberal Quaker books of Faith and Practice. 

But the Epistle itself is well worth dusting off. It addresses worship, ministry, marriage, and how to deal in meekness and love with those walking “disorderly.” It talks of how to support families and take care of members who were imprisoned or in need. Some of it’s language is a little stilted and there’s some talk of the role of servants that most modern Friend would object to. But overall, it’s a remarkably lucid, practical and relevant document. It’s also short: just over two pages.

One of the things I hear again and again from Friends is the desire for a deeper community of faith. Younger Friends are especially drawn toward the so-called “New Monastic” movement of tight communal living. The Balby Epistle is a glimpse into how an earlier generation of Friends addressed some of these same concerns. 

ONLINE EDITIONS OF THE EPISTLE AT BALBY:
Quaker Heritage Press
Street Corner Society
Wikisource

DISCUSSIONS:
Brooklyn Quaker post & discussion (2005)

From the Boston Globe:

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.

Howard was a real nice guy. Back when I was in book publishing we knew we could ask him for a nice back-cover quote and he’d always say yes. He was just that kind of person, supportive of the whole movement, the real deal.

He also had some of the best eyebrows on the Left!

I’ve been reading an 1806 book on Quakers, at A Portraiture of Quakerism. While at first it sounds as though Quakers at the time were against having any fun at all (music, dancing, reading novels,…

So, what would be a Quaker approach to the book give away? Well, we historically don’t engage in raffles (a topic that comes up every year or so at our children’s Quaker school). In any case, one of…

I for one have been thrilled with the out-of-print work I’ve found on Google Books and I’m glad they’re figuring a way past the lawyers and institutional inertia to make them accessible again.

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.

Good stuff from Anthony Manousos:

Perhaps the most important innovation in this work is its systematization of the Quaker social “testimonies.” Until the publication of Guide to Quaker Practice, there was no consensus about what Friends’ social testimonies were. Howard surveyed this jumble of advices and distilled them into four distinct and memorable social testimonies—simplicity, peace, community, equality—and one personal testimony (integrity). Howard’s formulation of the five Quaker testimonies has become so commonplace in Quaker religious education that it is often referred to by the acronym SPICE. Few Friends realize that Howard “discovered” or “reinvented” the testimonies in 1943.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the hodgepodge of testimonies in the old Books of Discipline, and reading Thomas Clarkson’s outsider account of circa 1800 helped me understand their use better. They were more practical & experienced-based that the SPICE list. Their underlying pattern was the way they addressed actual problems that had arisen in the Society of Friends. I’ve called them the “collective wisdom wiki” of Friends.

And my response in the comments:

As an old philosophy major I love the elegance of SPICE but I think the lack of specific testimonies has hurt our ability to identify and name issues when they come up at meeting. The modern world still has temptations that divide us from God, hurt our ability to empathize with our neighbors and divide our faith community but how do we talk with one another about these practices?

Preparing for the talk, Eileen Flanagan book reading.

Discussion over hors d’oeuvres, Eileen Flanagan book reading.

Wisdom to Know the Difference book reading:

Quaker blogger Eileen Flanagan (Imperfect Serenity) gives a reading from her new book The Wisdom to Know the Difference in the Big Blue Marble bookstore in Philadelphia’s Mt Airy section.

The morning after this talk Eileen wrote a post “Eight Things I’ve Learned (So Far) About Giving a Book Talk.”