Category Archives: Hard-Core Quaker

“Shut Up And Go Home!” – Echoes in Kenya & Quaker Carolina

What’s Obama in Kenya got to do with North Carolina Quakers and their current troubles?

Stay with me.

First, Kenya has a probably the biggest Quaker population of any nation.

And the official position of its leadership supports both the Kenyan anti-gay laws and the biblical interpretations that they are largely based on.

Actually, the official Quaker position there goes further than Kenyan laws. Gays can get up to 14 years in prison for having sex there; but the Kenyan Quaker leadership insists that:

“God outlawed all homosexuality and bestiality as sexual perversion that should not be tolerated. All sexual perversions were worthy of death, indicating their loath sameness before God. . . . Modernizing Christianity to meet our own selfish desires is immoral. The God of yesterday is the same today and tomorrow and His commandments have remained and will remain forever.“

“Worthy of death.” Spin it any way you want: that’s hard core.

There are numerous ties between Kenyan Quakers and Friends in NCYM.

North Carolina YM: Goodbye To Doormat Quakerism?

“We are concerned about rumors, innuendo, gossip and bullying not only concerning prospective personnel, but among the larger body of Friends in the Yearly Meeting. This behavior is hurtful to some and a hindrance to all, is unbecoming and not consistent with our Quaker Christian expression of love.
We ask that this letter of concern be read in the next meeting of each Yearly Meeting committee or organization, and that we all seek to follow the commandment of loving one another in a Christ-like manner. We pray that Friends cease to participate in rumors, innuendo, gossip and bullying, and take a clear stand against such activity if it occurs in your presence.”

Change Comes to Timeless Olney & Friends Music Camp

The shale oil/gas drillers are aggressively seeking out and buying up oil rights to properties near and far in this shale-rich region.
Including Barnesville.

Including Olney Friends School.
And thus has crumbled the strongest, most comforting illusion I have nourished about this Quietist Quaker oasis, perched on its ridge, but shielded on three sides by woods, and facing a pond like a moat on the other.
Here the school has stood at one end for five generations, clinging to its past while being pushed into a turbulent present; and at the other end of the long green lawn is the big, venerable Stillwater Meetinghouse, the seat of Ohio Yearly Meeting- Conservative.
Both the yearly meeting & the school have been offered money –big money– for fracking rights here under their ridge. Both have said no.
So far.

Is Jesus Just Like A U.S. Soldier??

Let me point out, Sir & Ma’am, that in fact, many other “defining forces” HAVE indeed offered to “die for me,” starting with my mother.
Yes: close to two thousand mothers in the U.S. not only “offer” to die but actually do die either giving birth or shortly afterward, every year.

Then there were numerous first responders: firefighters, police officers (more than a hundred killed per year on duty) and the like, who took many very serious risks on my behalf.

Rather, what soldiers actually offer to do is KILL for “me” — not at my personal request, but on orders from strangers in Washington.

Jesus didn’t do that. In fact, when his followers started to fight to protect him, he told them to stop. (Read Matthew 26 & John 18)

Richard Nixon’s First Cover-Up: His Quaker Religion

A former Nixon speechwriter-turned newspaper columnist compared Nixon’s personality to a many-layered birthday cake: cut into his persona and there was layer after layer, after layer.
It’s a striking image. But historian Larry Ingle’s new book about Nixon’s religion left me with a very different visual sense: that I had been peering down a deep, dark well, then shining a small but sharp penlight into the depths, hoping to glimpse the reflection of water, but finally seeing only a distant, dry emptiness, with an accumulation of trash, the deposit of endless lies.
And without Ingle’s saying so flatly, I also got nearly as strong a sense from the book that Richard Nixon, the second Quaker president, learned his lying ways first from, of all people, his supposedly “sainted” mother.
What’s the evidence for this?