All posts by Chuck Fager

Progressive Friends vs Wealth Inequality: Many Good Questions, Few Good Answers . . . .

In 1856, the Pennsylvania Progressive Friends heard a report from a committee “appointed to consider whether any, and if any, what Limitations ought to be put to the Accumulation of Property in the hands of individuals, as well as corporations, and to suggest laws and other expedients, by which the enormous inequalities among the children … Continue reading Progressive Friends vs Wealth Inequality: Many Good Questions, Few Good Answers . . . . →

Quakers Scare the HELL Out Of A Proslavery Methodist Minister (Peacefully)

Moncure Conway (1832-1907) was a Virginian who started his career as a proslavery Methodist preacher. In the following passage from his Autobiography, he describes his encounter with liberal Quakers around Sandy Spring, Maryland, in the early 1850s.
These Friends were antislavery in a slave state, and both this witness and their quiet faith set Conway off on a searching process of personal and religious change. Soon Conway left the Methodist church and its hellfire-and-damnation theology, and he later returned to the South as a Unitarian minister. But his new antislavery views, though far from the most radical, resulted in his being exiled from his native region. I found this memoir fascinating and charming. I hope you will too.

A Progressive Quaker Sermon – By Lucretia Mott

NOTE: Lucretia Mott, considered at the time of her death in 1880 to be the “greatest American woman of the nineteenth century” by many of her contemporaries, was a Quaker abolitionist, women’s rights activist and social reformer. She was a key figure in an insurgent movement of Progressive Friends. Her messages and actions are very … Continue reading A Progressive Quaker Sermon – By Lucretia Mott →

Progressive Friends Origins – Part 1

Where did Progressive Friends come from? How did they get started? To get at these questions, we have to start by taking down a myth: the myth of the peaceable Quaker liberals of the nineteenth century. They were the ones called Hicksites, who got that name when most American Quaker groups tore themselves into two … Continue reading Progressive Friends Origins – Part 1 →