All posts by Chuck Fager

Guilford: Quaker College On The Endangered List?

— Guilford is 274 above the lowest of the Forbes Financial Grades list. Does hovering 24 places above the bottom 250 mean it has a thin cushion? Or a frayed and disintegrating safety net?
— Guilford is, to repeat Moody’s, “tuition dependent,” and in many ways in a “weak market position,” with “limited pricing power.”
— If the school doesn’t find at least 200 more full-time students to increase tuition income, can it absorb another round (or two) of staff cuts without spinning into the “death spiral”? (The projection for enrollment next year? Flat.)
— Its plight is very similar to that of scores of other small liberal arts colleges, all of whom face “increased competition from cheaper public higher education . . . .”

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Re-Re-Re-Inventing The Wheel: 170 Years of “Convergent” Quakerism

As Robin Mohr, the younger Friend who coined the “Convergent” label put it, the idea appeals to “Friends from the politically liberal end of the evangelical branch, the Christian end of the unprogrammed branch, and the more outgoing end of the Conservative branch.”

But what has happened repeatedly is that the “politically (and theologically) liberal end of the evangelical branch” gets lopped off, and those involved either hunker down, or join an exodus.

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An Anti-Abortion Meme & My Reply

Notwithstanding my bias toward preserving life, I am clear that legal bans on abortion are bad & counterproductive public policy, in much the same way that Prohibition was the wrong answer to the “right” question of alcohol abuse (a question still very much with us, and still essentially unanswered).
Most Americans today have very little notion of just how disastrously deep and lasting was the social damage done by Prohibition.

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Lunch With the Anti-Christ at Western Quarterly Meeting

Wayne Lamb compared the Spring Letter to the teachings and practice of David Koresh (of the Waco cult which left more than 80 dead, including many children, in a 1993 shootout with authorities), and Jim Jones (of the Peoples Temple cult, which killed more than 900 people, also including many children, in a 1978 massacre). Similarly abusive (not to say slanderous) language and accusations, it is clear, have not been absent from the debates that have been ongoing over diversity of beliefs in NCYM.

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