Be honest: Could you say “No” to “the war to end wars”? Turns out that president Woodrow Wilson didn’t coin that phrase, and reportedly only used it in public once. But it doesn’t matter. The phrase, along with one that Wilson did use, “to make the world safe for democracy,” became key pieces of a … Continue reading Progressive & Liberal American Quakers Face World War One
Researching and writing about Progressive Friends took up most of my time from the autumn of 2013 through the spring of 2014. Often this was a paradoxical experience: from one angle, it was a very solitary effort: from another, very crowded. I did this research at Pendle Hill in Pennsylvania, as the Cadbury research scholar … Continue reading Dog Days Diversions: Alone Together: Living With & Writing About Progressive Friends
Moncure Conway (1832-1907) was a Virginian who started his career as a proslavery Methodist preacher. In the following passage from his Autobiography, he describes his encounter with liberal Quakers around Sandy Spring, Maryland, in the early 1850s.
These Friends were antislavery in a slave state, and both this witness and their quiet faith set Conway off on a searching process of personal and religious change. Soon Conway left the Methodist church and its hellfire-and-damnation theology, and he later returned to the South as a Unitarian minister. But his new antislavery views, though far from the most radical, resulted in his being exiled from his native region. I found this memoir fascinating and charming. I hope you will too.
NOTE: Lucretia Mott, considered at the time of her death in 1880 to be the “greatest American woman of the nineteenth century” by many of her contemporaries, was a Quaker abolitionist, women’s rights activist and social reformer. She was a key figure in an insurgent movement of Progressive Friends. Her messages and actions are very … Continue reading A Progressive Quaker Sermon – By Lucretia Mott
Where did Progressive Friends come from? How did they get started? To get at these questions, we have to start by taking down a myth: the myth of the peaceable Quaker liberals of the nineteenth century. They were the ones called Hicksites, who got that name when most American Quaker groups tore themselves into two … Continue reading Progressive Friends Origins – Part 1