“History doesn’t repeat,” Mark Twain supposedly said, “but sometimes it rhymes.” Are the conflicts within so many American churches over LGBTQ and associated issues part of some cruel karmic sonnet? The Separation Generation’s three volumes approach this question in prose, by chronicling disruptions among five American Yearly Meetings extending roughly from 2011 to 2018 (along … Continue reading Broken Churches, Broken Nation (Again?)
This is a developing story. Watch for Updates. I’m stunned. I just learned that David Zarembka, aged 77, a very distinguished Friend from Baltimore Yearly meeting, who lived for more than a decade among Friends in Kenya, and his wife Gladys Kamonya, 73 have both succumbed to Covid. Both passed in Eldoret Kenya. Gladys Kamonya … Continue reading Breaking! OMG — Friends David Zarembka & Wife Gladys Kamonya Dead of Covid
Is it over? Has The Separation Generation finished dividing U. S. Quakers? Yes and no. Yes, in a publishing sense: Book Three, the last of The Separation Generation series, is now done and available: Shattered By the Light; or The Ruins and the Green. In Shattered by the Light, parallel conflicts over sexuality, the Bible … Continue reading Is This The End of the Separation Generation?
If you drove west on the Chapel Hill-Greensboro Road through Snow Camp, North Carolina on Sunday, November 1, 2020, at about eleven AM, you would have passed a white chapel-looking building on your left. A few cars were parked outside, on the grass under the big old trees, which are shedding their wrinkled brown leaves … Continue reading Another Quiet Day at Spring Friends Meeting (not really)
Cambridge, Massachusetts, late 1970s “Heads up!” called the voice from the basement. “Here come the bags!” When they heard the cry a hundred men and women straightened up, like ragtag soldiers jerking to attention. Spaced about three feet apart, they stood in a line that ran from the open end of a big tractor-trailer truck … Continue reading A Between-the-Holidays Quaker Holiday Story: Beethoven in the Basement