Category Archives: Evangelicals

A Cautionary Tale and an Inspiration? The “Life of Quaker Service” of Annice carter

Finishing the new book Annice Carter’s Life of Quaker Service, my first query was: What if Annice Carter had ever learned to make bagels? Could that have changed history in the Middle East?

Annice in Middle Eastern dress.

She had the training and experience. With her college degree in Home Economics, cooking, including for large groups, was one of her many skills. And she was well aware of the implications of food for building community in diverse cultural settings.

Besides being a cook, Annice was a teacher, then Jill-of-(almost) all-trades, and later Principal of the Friends Girls School in Ramallah Palestine (started by New England Friends in the 1880s, and established as an elite  school for Palestinian students).

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When Hanging Wasn’t Brutal Enough for Black Prisoners: Southern Whites Brought In “Old Sparky”

From Reading Religion:

The End of Public Execution

Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South

By: Michael Ayers Trotti

266 Pages — $32.95

  • Published By: University of North Carolina Press

Michael Ayers Trotti’s The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South opens with a short transcription of a newspaper article about an Atlanta hanging. The report is about the 1891 execution of Frank Danforth, a Black man who had been convicted of the murder of his wife. The report mentions preachers saying prayers and singing, Danforth swaying to religious music, his repeated testimony to his belief in his own salvation, and white women who stood on a jailhouse fence to watch his execution. Trotti observes that the report describes Danforth’s execution as private because it was done behind jailhouse walls, even though hundreds of people were in attendance.

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Another Quaker Breakup: Indiana YM “Quits” FUM (Sort of)- Wants to Take Africa Missions With It

 

Time for a sequel?

The total number of splits in American Quakerdom since 2000 has just gone from five to six. And signs of more trouble are on the horizon.

Indiana Yearly Meeting (IYM), which saw eighteen of its meetings expelled or withdraw in 2013, has now pushed its separatism further by leaving Friends United Meeting.

But IYM wants to maintain its involvement in FUM’s African mission programs. How this is going to work, inasmuch as IYM’s “gospel” is that FUM is too heretical and corrupt to associate with at home, remains to be seen. As is whether FUM officials are so gullible as to permit the open sowing of future division in their remaining turf. Continue reading Another Quaker Breakup: Indiana YM “Quits” FUM (Sort of)- Wants to Take Africa Missions With It

Indictments, Schmindictments: Trump’s Still a Hero to “Christian” Supporters

AP News: Some critics see Trump’s behavior as un-Christian. His conservative Christian backers see a hero

Jesus-writing-for-TrumpFor eight years, Donald Trump has managed to secure the support of many evangelical and conservative Christians despite behavior that often seemed at odds with teachings espoused by Christ in the Gospels.

If some observers initially viewed this as an unsustainable alliance, it’s different now.

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