All posts by Chuck Fager

Tom Fox And The Last Supper

Tom had grown up in Chattanooga, then did twenty years in the Marine band in Washington DC. He played bass clarinet – and was about as unmilitary a soldier as one could feature. He began attending Friends meetings during this time. My first memories of him was being at meeting in a khaki uniform.
After the Marine band, he became a baker and assistant supervisor at a health food supermarket. He was good at this, and his bosses wanted him to move up in management.

But Tom heard a “different drummer,” especially after September 11, 2001. With a war on, he felt called to “pursue peace” in a concrete way. After much prayer and reflection, he joined the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT).

CPT sets out to bring the “weapons of the spirit” into the front lines of conflict, places where death and life are often but a hair’s breadth apart. This was dangerous work, in a region where conflicts seem hopelessly intractable.

Who’s More Scared of Free Speech? Baltimore Friends School, Or The N.Y. Times?

Baltimore Friends School Philosophy: “Quaker education is a pilgrimage–a continual seeking after Truth. The search for truth requires a willingness to listen openly to the ideas of others, even in fields of controversy.”

Except they were not about “to listen openly to” THIS controversy:

“At Friends, we work together to build and sustain a community that is inclusive, respectful, and supportive of all people; we value diversity and cherish differences. With this ideal in mind, the celebration of divergent viewpoints is not, and cannot be, without boundaries.”

And linking to an article in which conservative BFS alum Ryan Anderson argued for leaving same sex marriage decisions to the states was, Matt Micciche determined, beyond the boundary; it was evidently in the same league with organizing a lynch mob or shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

Oy vey. There’s no blinking it: The BFS head’s actions and statements were incoherent, anti-intellectual, cowardly, and un-Quakerly. If this sounds harsh, so be it. Right-wing blogs and pundits had a field day, and who could blame them?

Take An End-of-Summer Break: Read Quaker Mysteries

The goal was peacemaking between evangelicals and liberals. But then a rightwing televangelist turns up dead, and a gay Quaker activist is the prime suspect. Militants from all sides gather . . . and suddenly, amid old Civil War monuments, Friends are thrust onto the front lines of a deadly new kind of civil war . . .

As a reporter, I’ve covered many battlefronts in the current “culture wars.” And as readers of this blog know, the real-life drama just keeps on coming. And it makes for compelling fiction too.

Carolina Quakes: One Crisis Past; more To Do

Maybe it was reassuring that, with the crisis past, the Saturday afternoon session seemed to revert to annual routine: reports from Quaker Lake Camp, the ongoing work trips to Jamaican Friends, and more– fascinating to some, tedious to others.

My attention soon wandered. Which on this day, was likely a good sign. Even though this blog will likely have competition from a Greensboro daily paper, following up on the Quaker “Civil War stuff” here. Is it good news when what old-time Quakers called “The World” starts to follow our inelegant internal travails?