[NOTE: This post first appeared in 2019. Unfortunately, only the increasing list of mass shooting sites, and the ever-growing roll of victims’ names have changed since.] If you blog about Quakers long enough, you get asked a lot of questions — including some surprises. Like the one that came in a few days ago, from … Continue reading An Active Shooter in Friends Meeting. Now what?
Besides all her amazing exploits in the antebellum Underground Railroad (working very frequently with purportedly nonviolent Quakers), Tubman was no pacifist. And when the war broke out, she was eager to help the Union forces win it. After working with wounded soldiers, she also served as a scout and a spy behind enemy lines.
But she got her big chance after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of 1863.
And what will the exodus of the Nones turn into? Passive resistance like what filled the speakeasies under Prohibition, undermining it with every jug of moonshine and bathtub gin? More open, organized pushback?
Who knows: but I have an actual example of what could happen in mind: For 300-plus years, the Catholic Church was the dominant institution in Quebec Canada, with immense political as well as social power. Then around 1960, for reasons historians still debate, Québécois just had enough, and quit showing up. It wasn’t “organized,” but it was unstoppable. The mass departure sparked what is now called “The Quiet Revolution,” and included the collapse of clerical hegemony.
The African Saint started Western Europe on the downward course of religious persecution proper. Before him there had, indeed, been persecution of religions for racial or political reasons, but St. Augustine was perhaps the chief of those who supplied the religious motive for religious persecution, and turned God Himself into Moloch, a feat which no one but a really “good” man could have performed. Thenceforth, until the age of the much abused Whigs and sceptics, all the best people in the world were engaged in torturing each other and making earth into hell. It was through St. Augustine rather than through Constantine that the Church drank poison. The torch was handed down from him through St. Dominic and St. Ignatius till it scorched the hand of St. John [Calvin] of Geneva by the pyre of [Michael] Servetus. They were all, at least after their conversions, unusually “good” men, but not good all through like John Woolman.
In 1988 I wrote a substantial essay laying out my views about abortion, and describing how they had evolved over time. The piece also considered the increasing parallels, both rhetorical and political, between this struggle and the Civil War. Thirty-plus years later, despite some continuing evolution and updates, much of the piece still seems relevant, … Continue reading Abortion & Civil War – 2019 Update; 2021 Postscript