When, at age 19, as an already avowed Quaker, I finally learned that much of that information was outright false I felt deeply betrayed… Despite intensive Quaker experience at the monthly and yearly meeting levels as well as through Friends General Conference, I was failed by the Quaker adults in charge of my religious education. The word “failed” here seems strong so I want to qualify it. I do not believe that these adults even knew that they were letting me down.
See also: Post & discussion on QuakerQuaker
These moms kept saying to me, tiredly, “How do you do this?” and suggesting I write up tips telling moms how to make it look easy and fun, like I apparently do.
There are aspects of our sexuality about which we as Quakers have community expectations and standards – ways we hold each other accountable for using our God-given gifts responsibly. I can’t, however, tell you where the boundary is between acceptable and unacceptable. If we can’t articulate where the boundaries are, how do we avoid crossing them? We stay in tune with God, with ourselves as individuals, and with our partners. We identify elders, mentors, peers and loved ones with whom we can talk through the things that confuse us.
For those keeping track, this is the week of FGC’s Gathering. A bunch of the extended QuakerQuaker family is over there and they is covering the tweets, photos and blog posts coming out of there.
Favorites so far: Peterson’s “Where Everybody Knows Your Name (thanks to name tags)” and Jeanne’s first photo collection. There’s also an FGC Gathering tag and feed on Twitter (#fgc09) although so far it’s mostly of use to Gathering attenders.
The folks at Friends General Conference have a Twitter feed and designated tag for the year’s FGC Gathering of Liberal Quakers in the U.S. Being flexible, QuakerQuaker.org’s FGC Gathering coverage will be pulling from both the new official “#fgc09” tag and the “quaker.fgc” tag that many of us have been using.
For the curious, here’s a link to the 2006 post when I first suggested that Friends start tagging our FGC Gathering social media.
It’s hard to imagine now but there was a time in 2006 when Youtube didn’t own the video world, back when it was an independent project from some of the Paypal kids. I preferred its competitor Jumpcut, which allowed you to do simple editing online—splicing videos with pictures, adding headlines, etc. Then came the feeding frenzy: Google gobbled Youtube and Yahoo scored Jumpcut and the fate of the video services quickly followed the fortunes of its new masters.
Jumpcut is officially closed now, so I’m downloading my videos from there. They’re all short enough to repost to Flickr (another Yahoo property (so why couldn’t Jumpcut auto-import into Flickr? Grr…)). So here’s my archives from the early days of user generated video:
Francis Makes a Mess (Summer 2006)
This was a daily (sometimes hourly) occurence a few summers ago.
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Loading the FGC Gathering Truck (Summer 2006):
A big moment for American Friends, 2006 was the first time the main annual gathering of liberal Quakers was held on the West Coast. Jerimy P and Stephen D. boarded a rented truck a week before and drove the FGC Bookstore from Philadelphia to Tacoma, Washington.
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Theo sings the Thomas Song (Spring 2007):
The Thomas the Tank Engine song as sung by 3-1/2 year old Theo (don’t be confused by his initial description of it as the “Gordon Song”!),
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Francis Sings Elmo (Spring 2007)
