A friend messaged to ask how it’s going?
A brief update in North Carolina, as of Friday evening 10-18-2024:
I hear it was a record first day yesterday (Opening Day of early voting). At our polling place nearby, they told us 800 had voted there yesterday ), a record.
A later statewide report came from the NC state election board:
North Carolina Sets Turnout Record for First Day of Early Voting
Continue reading News of The (Voting) Day from (One of the) Front Lines
The Western Friend is continuing evidence (tho it’s still news to some) that there is lively Quaker periodical publishing outside Philadelphia. When the editor learned about Tell It Slant, she didn’t hesitate: Friend Mitchell Santine Gould’s review, the first, was included in its current online newsletter edition.
Published: June 22, 2024, in The Western Friend:
Tell it Slant: A prophetic life of adventure and writing on religion, war, and justice, love and laughter (Kimo Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Mitchell Santine Gould, Multnomah Monthly Meeting (6/19/2024):
Emma Lapsansky-Werner offers us a sprawling biography of Quaker journalist, activist, and gadfly Chuck Fager, in Tell It Slant. I read the first half with growing appreciation for two essential aspects of Chuck’s life. The first is his truly impressive involvement with so many historic moments in politics, society, and religion. The second, which nicely humanizes this history, is a very frank, very modest account of his own life – warts as well as triumphs. It must be rare that a biography succeeds so admirably on both aspects.
Chuck’s long experience as a professional journalist and author gives perfect clarity to his parts of the overall narrative. However, he had so much to say, that in order to marshal some flow and organization to so many anecdotes, memories, and histories, he was lucky that Emma Lapsansky-Werner extended her invaluable editorial contributions into the role of co-author.
As she put it, “In crafting this narrative, I have echoed Chuck’s scaffolding, weaving my spin together with many of Chuck’s own words; biography is interwoven with autobiography.” Although Dr. Lapsansky-Werner is an academic — a professor of Quaker history — she delivered the kind of powerfully clear and simple journalistic prose that seamlessly matched Chuck’s own. I think given all the constraints, Lapsansky-Werner acquitted herself well.
We’re no longer in an age of book-reading — info-snacking is more like it — and one might set the book aside rather read the whole thing at once. But should you resume in the middle of the book, its humor, charm, interest, and insight will even more deeply impress you. Tell It Slant is inspiring and above all, highly relevant. In addition to his decades of involvement with Quaker faith, practice, and internal politics, Chuck really kept his finger on the pulse of American society and politics — precisely because of his investment in his faith, of course.
When the stories are this compelling, you want the book to be perfect. Viewing Friend Chuck as the modern-day equivalent of history’s Publick Friend, I wanted him to be the exponent for liberal Quaker faith as I understand it. I hoped to see a conscious allegiance to the key innovation of Quakerism: its Inner Light theology. Informal polling that I did years ago revealed that Friends today have reduced the doctrine of Inner Light to little more than a sentimental “that of God in everyone.”
But historically, the Inner Light was recognized as a secret, silent hotline to the Divine, quite specifically as a source of guidance in times of an ethical crisis. Crucially, it was seen as capable of over-riding the two ubiquitous avenues for all moral supervision: the Bible and the clergy. Chuck mentions the Inner Light only twice, exclusively in anecdotes about an old Quaker lady he once admired. In reality, the Light is the power behind the often-praised Quaker virtue known as “discernment.”
Having said all this, let me turn to the controversial proposition that Quakerism can be succinctly described as SPICE: simplicity, peaceableness, integrity, community, and equality. I could write a whole sequel review showing how Chuck hits quite robustly on all these cylinders. And that ultimately trivializes all my criticisms of his book. I believe every Quaker should read it, and non-Quakers will also be deeply inspired, as I have been, by it.
– Mitchell Santine Gould, Multnomah Monthly Meeting (6/19/2024)
CNN: Tiananmen Square timeline
April 15, 1989 – Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party leader, dies. Hu had worked to move China toward a more open political system and had become a symbol of democratic reform.
April 18, 1989 – Thousands of mourning students march through the capital to Tiananmen Square, calling for a more democratic government. In the weeks that follow, thousands of people join the students in the square to protest against China’s Communist rulers.
May 13, 1989 – More than 100 students begin a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. The number increases to several thousand over the next few days.
May 19, 1989 – A rally at Tiananmen Square draws an estimated 1.2 million people. General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, appears at the rally and pleads for an end to the demonstrations.
May 19, 1989 – Premier Li Peng imposes martial law.
June 1, 1989 – China halts live American news telecasts in Beijing, including CNN. Reporters are prohibited from photographing or videotaping any of the demonstrations or Chinese troops.
June 2, 1989 – A reported 100,000 people attend a concert in Tiananmen Square by singer Hou Dejian, in support of the demonstrators.
June 4, 1989 – At about 1 a.m., Chinese troops reach Tiananmen Square. Throughout the day, Chinese troops fire on civilians and students, ending the demonstrations. An official death toll has never been released.
June 5, 1989 – An unidentified man stands alone in the street, blocking a column of Chinese tanks. He remains there for several minutes before being pulled away by onlookers.
Tiananmen Square History
While the events of 1989 now dominate global coverage of Tiananmen Square, the site has long been an important crossroads within the city of Beijing. It was named for the nearby Tiananmen, or “Gate of Heavenly Peace,” and marks the entrance to the so-called Forbidden City. The location took on added significance as China shifted from an emperor-led political culture to one that was governed by the Communist Party. . . .
On the 20th anniversary of the massacre [June 2009], the Chinese government prohibited journalists from entering Tiananmen Square and blocked access to foreign news sites and social media.
Still, thousands attended a memorial vigil in honor of the anniversary in Hong Kong. Ahead of the 30th anniversary of the event, in 2019, New York-based Human Rights Watch published a report detailing reported arrests in China of those associated with the protests.
The 1989 events at Tiananmen Square have also been highly censored on China’s tightly-controlled internet. According to a survey released in 2019 by the University of Toronto and the University of Hong Kong, more than 3,200 words referencing the massacre had been censored.
Tiananmen Square Censorship
It wasn’t until 2006 that Yu Dongyue, a journalist arrested for throwing paint at a portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square during the protests, was released from prison.
On the 20th anniversary of the massacre [2009], the Chinese government prohibited journalists from entering Tiananmen Square and blocked access to foreign news sites and social media.
A famous statue at the University of Hong Kong marking the Tiananmen Square massacre was removed late on Wednesday [December 22, 2021].
The statue showed piled-up corpses to commemorate the hundreds – possibly thousands – of pro-democracy protesters killed by Chinese authorities in 1989.
It was one of the few remaining public memorials in Hong Kong commemorating the incident.
Its removal comes as Beijing has increasingly been cracking down on political dissent in Hong Kong.
The city used to be one of few places in China that allowed public commemoration of the Tiananmen Square protests – a highly sensitive topic in the country. . . .
“The dissident Fang Lizhi, holed up at the United States Embassy in Beijing, in 1990, to avoid arrest after the Tiananmen crackdown, composed an essay titled “The Chinese Amnesia.”
“About once each decade, the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society,” he wrote . . . .
“This is the objective of the Chinese Communist policy of Forgetting History. In an effort to coerce all of society into a continuing forgetfulness, the policy requires that any detail of history that is not in the interests of the Chinese Communists cannot be expressed in any speech, book, document, or other medium.”
Grandson says Carter is ‘coming to the end’ in brief update about former president’s health
Michelle Shen, CNN — May 14, 2024
Jimmy Carter’s grandson said Tuesday that the former president is “coming to the end” in a brief update about the 39th president’s health.
“(My grandfather) is doing OK,” Jason Carter said at a mental health forum named in honor of his grandmother, the late former first lady Rosalynn Carter, at the Carter Center. “He has been in hospice, as you know, for almost a year and a half now, and he really is, I think, coming to the end that, as I’ve said before, there’s a part of this faith journey that is so important to him, and there’s a part of that faith journey that you only can live at the very end and I think he has been there in that space.” Continue reading Jimmy Carter: “Coming to the End”
By Hannah Natanson — April 15, 2024
Kali Fontanilla used to teach public school in California. Now she leads her own online Christian school in Florida. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA — Kali Fontanilla repeated the lesson title to herself one last time — “‘A Com-plete History of Slavery in America’” — sipped her peppermint tea and hit record.
“Hello, Exodus students,” she said, addressing the group of 90 fifth- through 12th-graders who would eventually watch the video as part of their lessons from the Exodus Institute, an online Christian K-12 school Kali and her husband founded in 2021 with the motto “Exit Public Education.” The video, which Kali was recording in her guest bedroom-turned-office, was the latest in a special enrichment program dubbed the “Young Patriots Academy,” which aims to “debunk the ‘woke’ lies taught in most public schools,” per the Exodus website.
Kali, who is half Black and half White, had a particular target that Friday: what she calls the left’s unquestioning advocacy of reparations, the theory that the government should pay restitution to descendants of enslaved Americans.
She told her virtual class they were about to learn of the Quakers, and how White members of that religion helped fight slavery. Continue reading They’re Making an (Anti-Woke) Example of Quakers in their “Christian” School: