A Biographical Excerpt: The Best Friend & The Last Big Surprise

An excerpt adapted from the forthcoming book: Tell It Slant, a Biography by Emma Lapsansky-Werner, with Chuck Fager:

Chuck’s first grandchild was born in September 1994, and named Amber Dawn. She and her mother, Chuck’s daughter Annika, lived in Martinsburg West Virginia.

One early milestone on Amber’s road lay almost five hundred miles northeast, in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Chuck felt a need to introduce Amber to her “Uncle David” Eppers there, and time was short. David was Chuck’s best friend, and all his four children called him “Uncle David,” though there was no blood relation.

Chuck knew the clock was ticking, not least because the Pendle Hill psychic had said so. Continue reading A Biographical Excerpt: The Best Friend & The Last Big Surprise

Is QAnon the Future of North Carolina Education?? It’s On The Ballot!

Enforcing school discipline can sometimes mean imposing tough penalties.

— Writing something 50 times on the board?
— Time-outs?
— Detention after school?

Michele Morrow, communicating

Naaah. Wishy-washy liberal mush. Michele Morrow, who hopes to be elected state superintendent of public instruction, says it’s time to get serious about public schooling in North Carolina:

— How so? Maybe by boycotting the public system? Morrow prepared to run the North Carolina public schools by homeschooling her own kids, so they never spent a  day in them.

— Or what about by joining a coup? Morrow was in the crowd at the U. S. Capitol on January 6 2021 as part of the drive to “Stop the Steal.” Morrow told the Raleigh News & Observer that “I broke no laws . . . I damaged no property. I did not enter the Capitol Building.”  Maybe. But she also posted a video from there declaring “We are here to ensure that President Trump gets four more years.” (Aka= overthrow a lawful election.)

Continue reading Is QAnon the Future of North Carolina Education?? It’s On The Ballot!

Filling in a Big Hole in Quaker History Writing, But not very accessible – UPDATE!

[UPDATED] The Quaker decades after the big Separation in 1827 are not well recorded and explained by Quaker historians.

The silence is especially loud on the “liberal” and Hicksite side.

This new book takes an important step toward opening up that “closed” history.
While its price is typically exorbitant ($50 for paperback; $118 hardcover, no E-book edition yet, interested Friends can ZOOM in for a discussion of it at the event described below.

The pricing policies for so much “scholarly” publishing keeps its “product” essentially out of most Friends’ reach and off most meeting library shelves. That’s such a shame, and my hat is off to the Amazon reader reviewer named “Shantinik” who called  it out this way;

“This is a book that should be widely available to Quakers and others. It won’t be. At this price, most Friends Meeting libraries won’t order it. Individual Quakers won’t. My local library won’t. My local university library won’t order it unless a professor requests it (and they won’t.).
No kindle edition? Means people with visual disabilities won’t be able to read it either. . . .”

If thee’s interested in this important period (and thee should be: lots happened that still matters), there’s a glimpse of it available on March 16, here —

Stephen Angell, Pink Dandelion, and David Harrington Watt will lead a book discussion on their latest edited book, The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830 – 1937.

UPDATE:

My apologies: I neglected to include the Zoom link that was provided along with the poster image, but not on it. Here it is:

Join the discussion in person or via Zoom using this link:

https://zoom.us/j/910522534?pwd=WTdCbEJoUHY4M1h6V0p1bkxBc1I2UT09

March 18, 11:20 AM EST @ ESR – Bring your brown bag lunch; we will provide deserts

What am I Missing? Some Burning Questions

[Note: These days, I don’t get out as much as I used to: age, ailments, etc.  That means I don’t keep up well as I once did.

So I may be missing some stuff, and I hope somebody will catch me up.  

This anti-LGBTQ news from Ghana and Burundi (and Kenya & Uganda) is really tough. And Quaker groups have connections there, and in that region, some long-running.

So, they’ve gotta be taking this on, right?

They must be working to protect LGBTQ Friends (& non-Quakes too), of course?

Good Samaritan and all that great  Bible stuff? Don’t they still teach that all the time? Continue reading What am I Missing? Some Burning Questions

What A Great Way To Go!

NYTimes

What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living

Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind.
By Phoebe Zerwick — March 12, 2024

Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr’s childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness.

Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr’s shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. “I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing,” Kerr told me.

Continue reading What A Great Way To Go!