Category Archives: Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs

Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs, Ecumenical & Interfaith, LGBTQ & Gender, Resistance, Signs of the Times, War & Peace

David McReynolds: Peace Movement Titan Is Gone

August 17, 2018 Chuck Fager 3 Comments

Another Eminent Pacifist leader Is Gone: David McReynolds

I only sort of knew David McReynolds, but he hovered significantly in the background of peace work during my apprenticeship in the Vietnam years.

David McReynolds, pacifist organizer stalwart, October 25, 1929- August 17, 2018.

My most vivid memory of David was not a personal encounter, but in the pages of WIN Magazine, a “radical pacifist” journal published by the War Resisters League. In 1969 he joined several other elder eminences in coming out there. These were the first confrontations I had had with homosexuals as sympathetic figures and colleagues.

His article was more personal than political, often embarrassed about how much his struggles in and out of the closet had cut into his driving impulse to organize nonviolent action against war and imperialism. Its candor and humility cut right through my unthinking, reflexive homophobia, pointing a way forward from it which I have worked ever since to follow.

Continue reading David McReynolds: Peace Movement Titan Is Gone →

Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs, Current Affairs, Ecumenical & Interfaith, Hard-Core Quaker, Quaker Education, Quaker History, Quaker Theology, Resistance, Signs of the Times

Friends Central School Lawsuit: The Fired Teachers Begin to Make Their Case

August 7, 2018 Chuck Fager 6 Comments

Let’s review: In February of this year, officials at Friends Central School in Philadelphia abruptly canceled a speaking engagement by a Palestinian Quaker peace studies professor, then suspended and later fired the two teachers who had planned the visit. Much public controversy ensued.

In May, the two former teachers filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, alleging discrimination and retaliation by Friends Central.

Earlier posts on the Friends Central School controversy are:

here, here, here , here & here.

Early last month, Friends Central’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, on the grounds that the two teachers had “failed to state a valid claim,” and that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would see the court become “entangled” in a religious dispute, which is prohibited by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

On July 31, the teachers’ attorney, Mark Schwartz, filed his response. Prosaically titled, “PLAINTIFFS’ MEMORANDUM OF LAW IN OPPOSITION TO DEFENDANTS’ MOTION TO DISMISS COMPLAINT,” it asserted that to the contrary, the teachers’ complaint did state valid claims, further that pursuing it would not require any impermissible meddling in religious doctrines, and that the motion to dismiss should be denied and the case be moved to its next phase, which is discovery of documents and other background, in preparation for a trial. Continue reading Friends Central School Lawsuit: The Fired Teachers Begin to Make Their Case →

Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs, Hard-Core Quaker, Quaker History, Quaker Theology, Remarkable Friends, Stories-Quaker

Friends Music Camp Stories #4: Old Plain Peter – The Ghost of Elders Past

July 29, 2018 Chuck Fager 1 Comment

Prelude

Before this final camp story, a bit of background. Until 2015, Friends Music Camp gathered at the Olney Friends School, in Barnesville in eastern Ohio.

Barnesville is the Mecca, the (old) Jerusalem, the place of pilgrimage where all roads lead for the scattered survivors of the Conservative or Wilburite strain of quietist Quakerism. These are the Friends who “conserved,” or clung longest to the “peculiarities” of dress and speech, and worked hardest at maintaining traditional “plainness”. (NOT “Simplicity”; that’s a modern, much watered-down imitation.)

Olney’s spirit is embodied in both its main school building, which has a sturdy, handmade character, and a pervasive Quietist atmosphere at its end of Sandy Ridge; and then in the huge, echoing space of the Stillwater Meeting house, which reigns at the other end of a fetching sidewalk of red brick laid in herringbone pattern.

In its heyday, Stillwater could hold a couple thousand, and was often filled during “Yearly Meeting week” for its parent Ohio (Conservative) Yearly meeting, and where visiting ministers could (yes!) preach for an hour..

Continue reading Friends Music Camp Stories #4: Old Plain Peter – The Ghost of Elders Past →

Agni ad Bellum/ The Lamb's War, Black & White & Other Colors, Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs, Fire This Time, Hard-Core Quaker, Quaker History, Quaker Theology, Resistance, Sedition Watch, Signs of the Times

Civility, Schmivility: A Quaker Dialectic, Then & Now

June 26, 2018 Chuck Fager 14 Comments

Debates over “civility” are nothing new for Quakers. And other people.

The last time I was thrown out of a retail establishment, it was a screen printing shop in Fayetteville NC, near Fort Bragg. I came in on a warm day in 2007, wanting some tee shirts made for a conference being planned by Quaker House. The shirts were to be black, and the wording something like this:

I handed over a CD with the image on it, and the guy at the desk put down his cigarette & slid it into a computer. I couldn’t see the screen when the image came up; but his widened eyes told me.

He stood up as the CD slid back out of the slot. “Hey, Sarge,” he called, and carried it into a back room.

“Sarge” was out in a couple moments; likely retired Army. He didn’t throw the CD at me, but dropped it on the counter and made clear in a loud voice that anybody at Guantanamo or what we were just learning to call “black sites” was a goddam terrorist who deserved whatever they got, and that he was not about to print such treason as this on any of his shirts.

I didn’t quibble. But I called the next shop on my list before I went in, to see if they too had any objection. The shirts got done. And I didn’t think til later about how the issue of who was being uncivil here could be fitted into the “It’s Complicated” category:

Was it “Sarge,” who at best might have considered my image some very bad joke that didn’t play; or was it I, who brought such a patently offensive message into his patriotic establishment?

Or consider this image: Continue reading Civility, Schmivility: A Quaker Dialectic, Then & Now →

Agni ad Bellum/ The Lamb's War, Black & White & Other Colors, Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs, Current Affairs, Ecumenical & Interfaith, Fire This Time, Resistance, Signs of the Times, Social Justice

Culling a Clue about Kids from our Carolina Crackpots

June 21, 2018 Chuck Fager 2 Comments

In North Carolina, right wing politicians are experts in scaring & mobilizing their base. And one of their most effective tools for this is: kids.

Especially kids being “threatened,” whether the threat is real or imaginary.

They used images of “threatened” kids to pass a same sex marriage ban; used them again to try to save their transphobic bathroom law. Etc.

(They’re probably planning to use “threatened” kids again in some nasty new way for the next election.)

Very effective campaign tactics, I can’t deny it.

Continue reading Culling a Clue about Kids from our Carolina Crackpots →

Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs, Hard-Core Quaker, Quaker History, Quaker Theology, Remarkable Friends, Resistance, Signs of the Times

Does Scot Miller Have the Answer to American Quaker Decline?

February 21, 2018 Chuck Fager 11 Comments

Not all U. S. Friends Meetings are withering away; I live close to two of them (liberal unprogrammed) which seem to be thriving.

But many meetings are shrinking. Several formerly large yearly meetings, particularly in the Midwest & South, are now but shadows of their earlier selves. One of the largest among them, North Carolina, went entirely out of business in 2017, after 320 years.

In many other meetings, pastoral and non-, generational gaps are opening, with now elderly Baby Boomers more or less in charge, while their children’s and grandchildren’s generations seem to be missing or sparse in attendance.

Similar trends are evident in numerous other larger denominations. Church growth “experts,” pastors, debt-burdened seminarians, and others whose paychecks are at stake, are showing signs of panic. Continue reading Does Scot Miller Have the Answer to American Quaker Decline? →

Bible Study, Books & Book Reviews, Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs, Current Affairs, Hard-Core Quaker, Quaker Theology, Resistance, Signs of the Times, Social Justice

Quakers Getting on the DOWN Escalator

January 29, 2018 Chuck Fager 9 Comments

Recently I read the amazing account of the Great Black Migration from the South, The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson.

It’s a fine, fine book, and its relevance here is that, paradoxically, until it was well underway, there was no such thing as “The Great Migration”; that is, no one named or organized it, no one “joined” it.

Rather, there were individuals & families fleeing for their own survival: seeking escape from the personal costs of official southern racism, grinding poverty and unrestrained violence. Only after such private decisions were acted on by hundreds of thousands, over decades, did scholars & writers come along to christen, study and begin to chronicle it.

Yet while “spontaneous” and unorganized, the Great Migration was indeed real and momentous, with national impact that’s still being felt.

A change equally unorganized & unheralded, potentially as momentous at least for us is, I believe, underway in the U. S. liberal Quakerism I discovered in 1965 (after ditching pre-Vatican II Catholicism). Continue reading Quakers Getting on the DOWN Escalator →

Black & White & Other Colors, Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs, Divergent Friends, Hard-Core Quaker, Progressive Friends, Quaker History, Remarkable Friends, Resistance, Signs of the Times, Social Justice, War & Peace

Dog Days Special, Part 2: Lucretia Mott’s Birthday Secret: No Woman Is an Island?

January 3, 2018 Chuck Fager 2 Comments

What “secret” am I talking about here? Lucretia Mott with a secret?

For her devotees, Lucretia Mott’s life is, or should be, an open book: born into a loving, encouraging family, married for 57 years to what one biographer called “the best husband ever”; she had a long public career of preaching and speaking, of which generous samplings have been preserved; and she wrote hundreds of letters which scholars have combed through. She also endured sorrows: the loss of two of her six children, and then widowhood; and she endured years of withering criticism of her ideas and “heresies.”

Lucretia! You really believed this stuff??

None of that is new, or unexamined. And in her personal carriage she was a model of traditional Quaker propriety: she disdained novels as frivolous and vain; it was husband James who sat in a quiet corner, burning the midnight oil, unable to put down Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Then, while Hicksites all around were shedding the grey and the bonnet, she was plain til the very end. Continue reading Dog Days Special, Part 2: Lucretia Mott’s Birthday Secret: No Woman Is an Island? →

Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs, Divergent Friends, Hard-Core Quaker, Progressive Friends, Quaker History, Quaker Theology, Remarkable Friends, Resistance

A Progressive Quaker Message from Lucretia Mott

January 2, 2018 Chuck Fager 1 Comment

“Truth for authority, not authority for truth.”

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 also a key figure in an important insurgent movement of Progressive Friends. Her messages and actions are very pertinent today – and laid much of the foundation for the current women’s movement.