At Earlham College, it’s going to be a tense Christmas this year, especially for faculty and staff. That’s because, whatever goodies Santa brings, the Grinch will be close behind, snatching away the good cheer and hopes for a happy new year in 2019. The Earlham Grinch will be in disguise, but the masquerade won’t fool … Continue reading Earlham, The Grinch, & Sections “M” & “N”
Prelude & Update Before this summer 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 converged for the scattered survivors of the Conservative or Wilburite strain of quietist … Continue reading Friends Music Camp Stories #4: Old Plain Peter – The Ghost of Elders Past
Fea’s piece is not just timely, it’s also important. He homes in on the fact that the “Christians” in Trump’s base are operating on a specific religious reading of American history, one that’s not new, but which has always been false.
In fact, it’s not really an exaggeration to say that our struggle today for a democratic American future is also a fierce struggle to confront & root out a false so-called “Christian” pack of lies about our past. Unfortunately, at the moment the false history charlatans are way ahead, and it makes a real difference. And it could soon make much more.
For many of us it might be a horrifying truth: sometimes to make a revolution (or preserve one; the US was born as a revolutionary idea), we have to sit down and do some serious homework, lots of it, about stuff like history.
Yesterday I spent a few hours hunched over my laptop screen, waiting for a number to arrive: the 250,000th hit on this blog. 250,000: A quarter of a million. Imagine. The hit counter said that number was near, and it felt like a major milestone for me. Sure, I realize that big time blogs can … Continue reading 250,000 Hits Later: Taking Stock of a Quaker Blog
The FCS attorneys are from a heavyweight Philadelphia firm (three names before the ampersand), and on June 3, they submitted a motion for dismissal of the lawsuit, and a supporting memorandum of law. (The full text is here.) In the memorandum, they spend 29 pages asserting, in numerous carefully-phrased ways, that “There’s nothing to see here — and you shouldn’t be looking at it anyway.”
Why not? Because, the biggest objection is that all the plaintiffs’ complaints are essentially religious, and thus out of bounds for civil courts . . .