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.
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Good visit from Cookie Caldwell this morning. He’s the Friend who runs Philadelphia-area Quaker’s high school programs. He’s been doing this for a lot of years and he has a wonderfully discursive style that easily goes off track into funny story and revealing anecdotes. Fortunately my wife Julie interrupted and got us back on track.
I’m going to come out to a program in August to talk to the high schoolers about the testimonies. Cookie had been assigned this topic and wanted to do something different than the ever-popular SPICE run-through, where five very broad categories of Quaker practices are tackled one after the other. Cookie Googled around and found my video, Quaker Testimonies as a Collective Wisdom Wiki (below).
I only have two 90-minute segments in August. Cookie told me how he’s long thought it would be good to have short videos for Quaker religious education. Ten minute videos combined with questions for the class to ponder. Most Sunday morning Quaker education program are about forty-five minutes and the leaders of the First Day Programs (as we Friends often call them) are looking for fresh material. So some of this might work itself out as a test of something like this.
