All posts by Chuck Fager

Friends Music Camp Stories #3: The Voice of God

I haven’t always been a flop at dancing. A few years later I learned to do the Twist pretty well; girls liked that. But that future achievement was no help in 1958. Even today, the bop remains a total mystery to me; I can’t even fake it decently. In fact, I sometimes imagine facing a solemn-faced judge, looking down from the bench, banging his gavel and declaring, “The defendant, Mr. Fager, having been found guilty, has a choice for his sentence: he must do the bop, right here and now, or face the firing squad.”

And in that nightmare scenario, I’d have to reply, “Your honor, may I have a last cigarette and that blindfold?” (And I hate smoking. But at least I know how.)

Camp stories – 2018: One: “Talking With The Trees”

But there was more to see in these trees on Bert’s farm than the fiery palette of the maples. Bert took us on a tour past his barn, down a path through a copse of these trees, beneath which the ground was crowded with seedlings and saplings, still green and fluttering in the morning breeze. The path led us to his large woodlot, in which tall pines stood in rows.

There we stopped, and Bert invited us to contemplate the two scenes we now confronted. On one side were the native trees, especially the maples, huddling together at random. But really, Bert explained, if we could only see the world from their perspective, we’d know the air of vivid autumn exuberance was an illusion; in fact, they were all caught up in a desperate struggle: each tree was stretching for the sky, competing with all the rest to take in enough sunlight to make its food to get through the coming long, cold winter.

This was not a friendly contest, but life or death, all against all. And below, the riot of green around our feet was even more deceptive: among the slim saplings and winsomely tiny seedlings, almost all, he told us, were certainly doomed. They would be crowded out by others, with the bigger trunks and branches blocking access to direct sun. At night, deer and other animals would chew up the tender shoots

Time To Do Some History Homework

Fea’s piece is not just timely, it’s also important. He homes in on the fact that the “Christians” in Trump’s base are operating on a specific religious reading of American history, one that’s not new, but which has always been false.

In fact, it’s not really an exaggeration to say that our struggle today for a democratic American future is also a fierce struggle to confront & root out a false so-called “Christian” pack of lies about our past. Unfortunately, at the moment the false history charlatans are way ahead, and it makes a real difference. And it could soon make much more.

For many of us it might be a horrifying truth: sometimes to make a revolution (or preserve one; the US was born as a revolutionary idea), we have to sit down and do some serious homework, lots of it, about stuff like history.

250,000 Hits Later: Taking Stock of a Quaker Blog

Yesterday I spent a few hours hunched over my laptop screen, waiting for a number to arrive: the 250,000th hit on this blog. 250,000: A quarter of a million. Imagine. The hit counter said that number was near, and it felt like a major milestone for me. Sure, I realize that big time blogs can … Continue reading 250,000 Hits Later: Taking Stock of a Quaker Blog →

Dandruff on the Boss’s shoulder: Friends Central School Strikes Back

The FCS attorneys are from a heavyweight Philadelphia firm (three names before the ampersand), and on June 3, they submitted a motion for dismissal of the lawsuit, and a supporting memorandum of law. (The full text is here.) In the memorandum, they spend 29 pages asserting, in numerous carefully-phrased ways, that “There’s nothing to see here — and you shouldn’t be looking at it anyway.”

Why not? Because, the biggest objection is that all the plaintiffs’ complaints are essentially religious, and thus out of bounds for civil courts . . .