Category Archives: Current Affairs

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 . . . .”

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.

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.

Nope, Nestle’s Is NOT The California Drought Devil

Bashing bottled water won’t fix California’s drought problem. Getting rid of the whole industry would make no real measurable difference.

Face it, folks.

So go ahead and hate on Nestle if you want to; but please — spare us the baloney about how trashing them will do anything for California. Because it won’t.

Moral Monday & Retro Nonviolence Is Back (Again)

The Moral Monday protest campaign, aimed at the reactionary NC legislature and its stick-it-to-everybody-but-the-rich program, was by many measures, quite successful in its first season of actions, in the spring and summer of 2013.

Above all, on my list, its biggest success is a kind of “negative”, that is: it has not splintered and vanished; two years later its core of supporters is still there, and yesterday (April 29 2015) it began the work of regathering and relaunching for 2015, at the state capital in Raleigh.

This action was not heralded as the beginning of the Revolution, but rather another round in what has been seen from the start as a long-term struggle.