quackquack

St Mary’s Festival (and Francis) featured in Phila Inquirer: The Feast of the Assumption Festival is front and center on page B-1 of today’s Philadelphia Inquirer with great photos from staff photographer Akira Suwa. Captions: “Sunday was a day of summer fun at the 87th annual Feast of the Assumption Carnival at St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in Malaga, Franklin Township. Top, Francis Heiland, 4, of Hammonton, splashes down a water slide. Above, the train ride was a popular attraction. Bottom: Colleen Bingam and Andrew Pron of Cape May carry their midway prizes. The carnival also featured a chicken barbecue and musical performances, and the day was to be capped off with a fireworks display.

Here’s how it looked on the page spread:

The reclaimed driveway. Mt Airy Philadelpha.

The resurrected window: This window had been covered over by plaster long ago. Liz had a replacement made and installed where the original had been. For Sale listing.

Door into the mudroom. For sale in Mt Airy Philadelphia.

The back garden “oasis”. House for sale as of 6/10.

Philadelphia area Friends interested in discussions, meet-ups and gatherings of Quaker Quakers. Eastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, Delaware.

Brian P. Tierney, CEO of Philadelphia Newspapers L.L.C., after delivering news that locals lost the bidding war for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. Via philly.com

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.

I was able to make up this list that displays QuakerQuaker.org membership profiles and upcoming gatherings in a geography-focused way.

Countries

Australia
Belgium
Canada
France
Germany
Greece
Ireland
Kenya
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
United Kingdom
United States

Select Cities

London
Philadelphia
New York
Richmond
Greensboro
Portland
Seattle
Birmingham
Boston
Minneapolis
San Francisco

U.S. Regions

New England
Mid-Atlantic
Southeast US
Great Plains
Southwest
Midwest
North Pacific

U.S. States

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Puerto Rico
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

Gatherings by Theme

Convergent
Yearly Meetings
Gatherings
Retreats
Online
Young Adult

Gatherings by Location

New England
United Kingdom
Mid Atlantic
Baltimore
Philadelphia
Great Plains
Northwest
Ohio

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.

At the PYM High School Friends retreat, Fall 2009: Shamelessly swiped from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Young Friends picture page. I’m guessing Cookie Caldwell took this picture.

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.

And for those wondering, this year’s U.S. Quaker nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize was Gene Sharp, whose exhaustive list of nonviolent strategies and case studies is must-reading for any campaigner.

And for those wondering about the “Quaker vote,” Friends won the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize en masse for post-war relief work. Friends were represented by what was then called the Friends Service Council (now Quaker Peace and Social Witness) in London and by the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, both of whom have the honor to nominate future recipients. According to the FGC Quaker Youth blog, this year’s AFSC nominating nod went to Sharp. The actual vote is up to the Nobel Committee itself.

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.”