Category Archives: Hard-Core Quaker

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?

Quakers Acting Badly: Bans, Brawls & Bungled Burials

Quakers Acting Badly: Bans, Brawls & Bungled BurialsIs the Truth of Friends Stranger (& Uglier) Than Fiction? Some who read the last post here, about a potential “housecleaning” visit to a local Friends meeting by a Yearly Meeting-appointed doctrinal “Auditing Committee,” might have found it far-fetched. And indeed it was fiction, though based on … Continue reading Quakers Acting Badly: Bans, Brawls & Bungled Burials →

Carolina Quaker Witch Hunt: Here Comes The “Auditing Committee”

“All meetings will be ministered [by the “Auditing Committee”]to in order to obtain change so that they might comply with the will of NCYM as to theological, financial and membership issues. There will be ongoing dialogue between the meeting and the Auditing Committee during this process. If any meeting which is out of compliance wishes to commit to change and come back into compliance, they will be asked to sign a statement of such by the pastor, clerk and all members of Ministry and Counsel and be on probation for one year with consequences. “