Category Archives: Hard-Core Quaker

The Northwest Gay Expulsion Impasse: Is A Break In Sight?

The Northwest Gay Expulsion Impasse: Is A Break In Sight? At its September business meeting, West Hills Friends (WHF) in Portland Oregon considered a statement accepting its expulsion from Northwest Yearly Meeting (NWYM) for having become a LGBT-welcoming congregation. If approved, the statement would be issued jointly with NWYM. The decision to expel West Hills was made … Continue reading The Northwest Gay Expulsion Impasse: Is A Break In Sight? →

Dog Days True Quaker Stories: The Party That Went On Too Long

Much of my initial “information” about the Communist Party came from watching a TV show, “I Led Three Lives,” after we got a TV in mid-1952. The show started the next year and ran for more than a hundred episodes. It was inspired by the true-life career of Herbert Philbrick of Boston.

For years, Philbrick was a seemingly ordinary white collar office worker. But he was also a secret member of the Communist Party, spying and planning to overthrow the American government — and even more secretly, a double agent helping the FBI foil the Communist schemes. In 1952, he published a best-selling book about all this; and Hollywood jumped on the story line.

(In an episode I sadly missed, one such –fictional– plot was about how the party was going to turn vacuum cleaners into handheld missile launchers. Sound, um, far-fetched? But J. Edgar Hoover approved that episode, as he did all of them, so it must have been thrilling.)

Now I know much better how, in the late 1940s and into the 1960s, “the Communists” were a very big deal for Americans. Hiss’s two trials marked a major turning point in U.S. public opinion, toward a hard anti-communism, of the sort I grew up absorbing like milk on cornflakes.

A Review of “Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey”

And now comes, in this effort to understand Quakerism, “Our Life Is Love,” by Marcelle Martin.

In the book, which she says is based on long study and wide personal engagement, she draws on “acquaintance with the lives of seventeenth-century Quakers, combined with the experiences of dedicated Quakers today.” From this mix she believes she has “unveiled ten essential elements in the process” of Quaker spiritual life.

She chose the term “elements” carefully, insisting that the ten features are not to be taken as stages in a definite procession, or prescribed rungs on a spiritual ladder. Nevertheless, she begins from her own early sense of religious longing, as the first element, and the ten are grouped into three categories of Awakening, Convincement and Faithfulness, which certainly appear progressive, and reasonably so.

To illustrate her ten elements, she draws in quotes from numerous Friends, from early times and now. She also labors to include among them voices from across the theological spectrum and around the Quaker world, including Friends of color, Latin Americans and Africans. Linguistic and cultural differences make this effort feel strained at some points, but it’s a noble one, and basic to developing a Quakerism for our time, and not just for our local parochial place.

Quakerism As Therapy?? A Good Idea? Good Religion??

Here are excerpts from an article describing “The Influence of Psychoanalysis and Popular Psychology on Quaker Thought & Practice: An Exploratory Survey,” by Jacob Stone. Stone is both a longtime Friend and a retired psychologist, who had a long career in human services and human services education in higher education, as well as serving as an ethicist and ethics trainer.

Stone raises the curtain on a well-established phenomenon particularly at the liberal end of this constituency. Yet it’s one that is hardly ever remarked on, except in passing: the pervasive influence of pop psychology and the morphing of “spirituality” (also previously known as “religion”) into a kind of therapy equivalent.

Was George Fox A Liar? (Alas, The Answer Is Yes.)

For enthusiastic new Friends, it’s something of a sobering rite of passage to learn that many of the great names among the founders are not reliable witnesses in their own cause. However, careful historians have long since proven this to be the case.
One of them was H. Larry Ingle.
H. Larry Ingle, who summer & winter was usually first in line at the local store in Chattanooga where the Sunday New York Times was delivered.

Larry is now retired from a long career teaching history, mainly at the University of Tennessee – Chattanooga. Sometime before 1994, he went to London, and padded down the stone steps of the large Library at Friends House (an imposing structure sometimes dubbed the Quaker Vatican), into the half-lit depths where the earliest Quaker manuscripts and publications were stored. Then he began looking at many of the pamphlets and broadsides from the first generation of Friends. And soon he had made a remarkable discovery:
In the 1650s and 1660s, books and pamphlets were printed on large sheets containing many pages, on both sides. The big sheets were folded into book form, sewed up on one edge for binding, and then the folds on the other edges of the pages were trimmed or slit open for reading.

1666-quaker-pamphlet-women-speaking Except that Larry found many important pamphlets from that period on the shelf with the pages un-slit – that is, they had never been opened or read, not in three hundred-plus years.
For Larry this was deja vu all over again. In the early 1980s he visited a major Quaker archive, and accidentally discovered that none of the original documents about the Great Quaker Separation in 1827 had ever been looked at — which meant that all the available books on the schism were based on third- or fourth-hand sources, and quotes from each other.
This was a stunning example of scholarly laziness and timidity — and an opening for an energetic historian who was not afraid of work. The result was Ingle’s first major book, Quakers In Conflict (1986), today the standard history of the schism.