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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.

This looks pretty cool. November in Philadelphia. Jerry Frost is one of the keynotes:

This major international, interdisciplinary conference aims to examine the history, literature, and culture of the Quaker relationship with slavery, from the society’s origins in the English Civil War to the end of the American Civil War.

Late last week I helped soft-launch a “news, analysis and commentary” site from veteran Philadelphia reporter Tom Ferrick called “Metropolis” and located at http://phlmetropolis.com. An alum of The Inquirer, Tom’s spent the last half-dozen years talking to everyone who will listen about the future of print and Philly news. He’s done talking and is showing what can be done with a shoestring budget. From “This is Metropolis,” the lead article:

Local newspapers, TV and radio stations are retreating from in-depth coverage of regional news either due to economic or audience considerations.

The retreat has been gradual, but no one expects it to stop.  The company that owns the region’s largest newspapers - the Inquirer and Daily News - is in bankruptcy. The size of the editorial staffs at the papers continues to shrink. The prognosis for metro dailies here and elsewhere is not good. The journalism practiced by these papers is still robust, but the economic model that has sustained it is eroding.

If these traditional sources of news falter or fail what will take their place? Will local TV and radio stations fill the gap by hiring additional reporters to do in-depth stories? Will bloggers, known mostly for commenting off the news, begin to cover it?  The odds are against this happening.

My review of a talk that Guilford College’s Max Carter gave at the Bible Association of Friends:

Max Carter gave the Bible Association of Friends this past weekend at Moorestown (NJ) Friends Meeting. Max is a long-time educator and currently heads the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program at Guilford College, a program that has produced a number of active twenty-something Friends in recent years. The Bible Association is one of those great Philadelphia relics that somehow survived a couple of centuries of upheavals and still plugs along with a mission more-or-less crafted at it’s founding in the early 1800s: it distributes free Bibles to Friends, Friends schools and any First Day School class that might answer their inquiries.

Read more.

Oh, to be a young believer in Philadelphia right now, where the spirit of Christian activism is mingling vigorously with an apparently unkillable strain of old-school countercultural Jesus-freakery. Here, if you’re listening, you’ll hear hosannas on the streets, and a flavor of tambourines. A band called Psalters mounts an ululating, multi-drum offensive against the capitalist hegemony. They dress the part, too—if you saw this lot coming on a dark night, you’d run. The dreadlocked Shane Claiborne is here, author of The Irresistible Revolution (2006) and a leader of a movement known as the New Monasticism. Claiborne co-founded the Simple Way community in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood in 1998, and the area has since grown to include a branch of the young storefront evangelical church Circle of Hope.

Had a good time with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting high school Friends yesterday, two mini-session on the testimonies in the middle of their end-of-summer gathering…

Spiritual Growth and Renewal, Caring for Our Community, Witnessing our Faith, Making Ourselves Known

The Times profiles the dealings at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, now locked in bankruptcy proceedings:

A possibility exists, probably remote at this point, that the papers could just fold, making Philadelphia the winner of a dubious sweepstakes: first major American city to be left without a daily newspaper.

Of course, one sign of the paper’s lost relevance is the fact that I’m reading this in the New York Times, a site I check into every two hours or so. When was the last time I went to Philly.com and did I even find whatever I was looking for there?

This Quaker meeting sits along Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs and is making special efforts at outreach. They wanted a design refresh that would allow the heads of committees direct access to…

A.K.A. the Deshler-Morris House, where George Washington really did sleep! From the National Park Service site:

President George Washington also briefly occupied the Deshler-Morris House, a two and a half story stuccoed stone house at 5442 Germantown Avenue. The National Park Service restored this building to the way it looked when George Washington was the occupant between 1793 and 1794. A group of dedicated volunteers provides tours of the property, while the National Park Service continues to maintain the house and grounds. Here in 1793, the executive branch of the government dealt with the problem of Edward Genet, the former French minister. He had commissioned privateers in American ports to prey on British ships along the American coast and in so doing jeopardized relations and risked war between Great Britain and the new nation. The next summer, Washington rented the house again hoping to protect his family from yellow fever, while he carried out his duties as president. The home became known as “the Summer White House.”

My mother Liz says she was given a lot of reading to prepare herself to give tours. I’m not too worried about qualifications, as we had framed pictures of Germantown on our walls growing up (she carefully cut out her favorite scenes from a neat old book and framed them herself with red felt matting!). I think the “summer White House” was actually one of the pictures on our walls!

Quote: There is a dis-ease in our Yearly Meeting and its primary symptom is this: we can’t find enough people to do the work of the Yearly Meeting, and even when we do, we in these positions of - what? Authority? Perspective? - we sense we are often not finding the right people to serve.