Category Archives: Hard-Core Quaker

Northwest YM Leaders Kick The LGBT Expulsion Can Down the Road

Here is the message that has been sent out by Northwest Yearly Meeting leaders on January 22, 2016; it does not seem to have been made widely public yet:

“Regretfully, we are not able to come to unity to overturn or affirm the elders’ decision to release West Hills. Therefore, we’ve postponed the effective date of West Hills’ release at least until yearly meeting sessions.

At that time, the Board of Elders will report to the Yearly Meeting its summary of the state of the church, allowing time for prayerful consideration of issues raised by the report and by any attached judgments or interpretations offered by the Board of Elders.”

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It’s Time (Again) for Doug Gwyn’s Book, “Words In Time”

Doug said about “Words In Time,” when it was first published:
This book is a collection of short pieces, most of which have appeared in print elsewhere. They cover a nine-year period, 1988-97. I chose the title “Words in Time” because several of the pieces were written for particular occasions, and address specific dilemmas facing Friends at the time. As such, these keynotes and essays are somewhat time-bound and situation-specific. For example, “The Covenant of Light” addressed Friends United Meeting shortly before the “Realignment” controversy erupted at the end of 1990. But problems of alienation and mutual exclusion within the wider Quaker family continue; the message of reconciliation still needs to be heard.

[Thee Can Say THAT Again! Okay, he will: “But problems of alienation and mutual exclusion within the wider Quaker family continue; the message of reconciliation still needs to be heard.”]

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“Spotlight”: A Movie About Reporters: A Treatise On Evil

Early Spotlight Team investigations in the Boston Globe usually took aim at public corruption, of which Boston seemingly had an endless supply. I never met any of the team writers; they kept a low profile, but the group provided a model of getting the dirt, getting it straight, and getting the story out, that sticks with me to this day.

Looking back, there’s one more big jolt of reality for me in the film: it came as Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams, as reporters Mike Rezendes and Sacha Pfeffer, compile a list of more than seventy Boston priests with pedophile track records –using the real names that the Spotlight Team unearthed. The list scrolled down the screen, and one name jumped out: as a cub reporter, I had met and interviewed one of the priests on the list.

Father Paul Shanley, about the time I interviewed him. I had no clue. Neither did anyone else. Except his victims, which were already numerous.

It was in the early Seventies, and Father Paul Shanley presented as a hip young cleric, with long hair, pursuing a “street ministry” to runaways, pushing the stodgy church envelope. I took him to be in the orbit of Catholic antiwar radicals like the Berrigan brothers, whom I had also interviewed.
Exposed thirty years later by Spotlight writer Sacha Pfeiffer, played by Rachel McAdam in the film, he was brought up on multiple charges of child rape, and in 2005 sentenced to 12-15 years in prison.
At the time I talked to him, he was deep into his boy raping career. I never had a clue.

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My Quaker 50th Anniversary (Already?)

This month, December 2015, marks the 50th anniversary of my coming among Friends. And much of that whole ongoing adventure can, for this purpose, be boiled down to four things:

A knock on the door;
Getting “The Letter”;
Riding the bus; and
Getting on with it.

The knock on my door came (as best I can recall) in early December, 1965, on Lapsley Street in Selma, Alabama.
Alabama in general, and Selma in particular, were extremely unlikely places for this to happen, among the least likely in the U.S. But it did, reflecting the recurrent tendency for Quakers to turn up where they are least expected.
My wife Tish, answered the knock, and then recoiled in fright. A young white woman stood there — and looked as scared as Tish did.
We were living in the black part of Selma, had been working with Dr. King’s staff in the voting rights movement for almost a year. There had been some violence, plus ominous, heavy-breathing phone calls to the house, that sort of thing. So we were cautious.
But as soon as the young woman spoke, her accent showed she was not a local, and Tish relaxed. In fact, she was a student with a group from a new Quaker educational experiment, Friends World Institute (later College).

At the school they studied problems (like racism) rather than conventional courses; and did this with a lot of “study travel,” trekking off in VW Microbuses to places far away from the school’s initial base on Long Island, New York. Places like Selma, where Dr. King’s office staff sent them out to canvass in black neighborhoods to find people of color who still needed to register. Which brought her to our door.

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Survival & Revival: The Day The Smiles Are Well-Earned

This commemoration, while very personal, was not only about closure in Christine’s life. The fact that many women unknown to Christine or any of us showed up to join in as part of their own survival and revival, and underlining the fact of domestic violence as an ongoing issue in U.S. military culture.
And the 2007 event was not the end. Many more awful cases of domestic violence surfaced at and around Fort Bragg in my remaining years there (til November 2012). And the members of the Fayetteville NOW chapter, who had worked on this issue for man-years, and were powerfully moved by Christine’s witness, decided to make an annual event of laying a wreath at Beryl; Mitchell’s grave. They settled on early December, on or close to the day she was murdered.

And so they have. Each year since, in rain, in sleet, or cloudy and chill wind, they have gathered, sometimes few, sometimes more, and laid a wreath and taken both comfort and strength from this quiet ritual.

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