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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.

What impressed me most was the peaceful nature of it. There was a complete absence of anxiety in the room. In my own church experience—in the rare opportunities that laypeople have to speak in…

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!

Wow, what a story.

Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was on a business trip in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the “Little Boy” device detonated above Hiroshima.

Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than 2 miles away from ground zero. His eardrums were ruptured and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.

Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to his hometown of Nagasaki the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people there.

Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with The Independent newspaper.

“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he said.

When I first heard that Quakers had testimonies I was immediately drawn back to my more Charismatic days when we would stand up and give “testimony to the Lord because of something he’d done.” Or when someone would stand up and share personal “testimonies” about how they became a Christian. Both of which refer to a kind of personal transformation that one has experienced in his or her life. The quaker understanding of testimony is actually close to this because Quaker testimonies deal with how Quakers have personally witnessed and experienced God’s guidance on various issues like war, taking oaths, plainness, truth telling, trade, slavery, parenting, taverns, education, etc.

The Aymara culture is by nature conflictive, and part of the gospel impact has been toward peace and reconciliation between social and cultural divisions. Both sides of this complex reality continue in the Bolivian Friends Church. Sometimes I wonder why peace-loving Friends have suffered so many internal conflicts and divisions. I have to remind myself of the very real difference that the gospel of Jesus Christ has made and is making, despite the temptations and tendencies of the context.

Over on QuakerRanter:

“We’ll end the war just as soon as…” is the rhetorical parent of empire-crushing quagmires. The conditional changes as needed, because it needs to stay fresh to stay plausible. One president will claim that the right enemy leader needs to be killed, another that more troops need to be temporarily added.

Read the full post.

we wear plain clothing, and engage in an alternative economy as much as we can, in order to promote what we believe are the values that best reflect the character of Jesus and early Christ-centered communities. It is a voluntary public witness to our Quaker testimonies. We hope not to inspire others to dress plain, but to think seriously about the world around them, and develop their own community driven public witness to peace, justice, and the salvific character of Jesus the messiah.

I just got an email from Alyse Emdur, an artist in the Los Angeles area who’s started this project. I don’t know her but she wants to get the word out and I’ve never heard of anything quite like it. Here’s the description:

While teaching, I witnessed the presence of army recruiters in our educational environment. I am initiating a nation wide participatory project, Photograph a Recruiter and am inviting high school students to contribute. The project invites high school students to photograph the military recruiters in their schools! Through the act of looking back at recruiters, students are encouraged to engage in critical discussion about war and recruitment.

The ongoing growing collection of photographs, taken by high school students, will be uploaded on the website www.photographarecruiter.com. Select images will also be printed for exhibit in a traveling Photograph A Recruiter art show. For more information, or to submit image(s), write to, photographarecruiter@gmail.com

Friends are now at a crisis… We can conform to political culture… liberal Friends siding more and more with the democrats, Orthodox/evangelical more and more with the republican Religious right. We…

I wish I could say that this simple form of worship never leads to conflict, but I must be honest and admit that people in Meeting sometimes get upset about the vocal ministry. When you allow people…

As the chair of a group of people of diverse faiths who have been meeting since 9/11 to promote justice and peace, I agree with President Obama that the Peace Prize is a “call to action.” We hope it will encourage and challenge him not only to fulfill his promises, but to go further. It is not enough to withdraw troops from Iraq, he should also have an exit strategy for promptly withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

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?