All posts by Chuck Fager

After Charleston: Ban the Confederate Flag?? Let’s Do Something REAL.

And let me repeat his main point: the U.S. Civil War had two phases; only the first one ended in 1865, and southern white supremacists won the second phase.

They didn’t form a separate country; but they established a widespread common culture of segregation, maintained by both law and terrorism; and they recreated many slavery cognates.

Let’s call this the New-Confederacy. Not for nothing was the movie that became their epic called “The Birth of a Nation.”

Birth-of-a-nation

New-Confederate rule was somewhat disrupted in the 1960s; there have been some important changes since then. But the New-Confederate forces have come roaring back in the past decade, to regional dominance and national impact, on numerous fronts.

Quakers Acting Badly: Bans, Brawls & Bungled Burials

Quakers Acting Badly: Bans, Brawls & Bungled BurialsIs the Truth of Friends Stranger (& Uglier) Than Fiction? Some who read the last post here, about a potential “housecleaning” visit to a local Friends meeting by a Yearly Meeting-appointed doctrinal “Auditing Committee,” might have found it far-fetched. And indeed it was fiction, though based on … Continue reading Quakers Acting Badly: Bans, Brawls & Bungled Burials →

Carolina Quaker Witch Hunt: Here Comes The “Auditing Committee”

“All meetings will be ministered [by the “Auditing Committee”]to in order to obtain change so that they might comply with the will of NCYM as to theological, financial and membership issues. There will be ongoing dialogue between the meeting and the Auditing Committee during this process. If any meeting which is out of compliance wishes to commit to change and come back into compliance, they will be asked to sign a statement of such by the pastor, clerk and all members of Ministry and Counsel and be on probation for one year with consequences. “

For Friendly Summer Reading: Two New Books

So you know I’ve been interested in Quakers and Quakerism for decades.
I began exploring this interest by writing stories about Friends in 1977.
Beginning in 1989, I was asked to read my Quaker and other stories to campers and adults at Friends Music Camp, at the Olney Friends School in Ohio, where Peg Champney was the founding Director. I’ve been invited back to read more of these stories every summer since.
Now I’ve collected nineteen of these stories in a new book, “Posies for Peg.”
And: My granddaughter came to me awhile back, to say that some schoolmates had been asking her about what Quakers believe, and how our beliefs differ from other Christian churches — but she didn’t know how to answer them.
Her uncertainty was no surprise: even though she grew up among Quakers, she hadn’t been taught about Quakerism. And I couldn’t find any compact, accessible guide to the topics that kept coming up for her.
So I set out to produce one.
I wanted to offer concise answers to some of these typical questions. So far I’ve gathered almost fifty such FAQs.
These make up a new book — really an over-sized pamphlet– called, Some Quaker FAQs. I think of it as the beginning of an “un-systematic theology” for Friends.

The Photo I Hoped I’d Never See

It remains unclear how over 450 additional troops would overcome the central problem to the training effort in Iraq: a lack of recruits to train. . . . The announcement was greeted with indifference and scepticism in Iraq, where efforts to arm local Sunnis opposed to Isis have foundered and training programmes by the US have made little progress in producing disciplined Sunni fighters capable of challenging the militant group.
“The increase doesn’t have an effect,” said Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar and expert on Isis. “It is a weak step to reduce pressure from the media.”