Category Archives: Resistance

Current Affairs, Fire This Time, Remarkable Friends, Resistance, Signs of the Times, Stories-Quaker

Lucy In The Sky, No Diamonds – A Quaker Ghost Story

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Part One: Trying to Catch the Bus

Copyright © By Chuck Fager

San Francisco – 2006

Muni-Trolley-bus-Market-street-San-FranciscoKate was racing the Muni bus toward the stop at the corner. She was wet and out of breath. It was bad enough, she thought as the bus slowed, that the skinheads had ripped up her peace poster. But why did they have to drench her with ice water?

The bus stopped and the doors flapped open. Kate leaped onto it, flashing her bus pass and shivering her way toward the back. A sudden San Francisco fog had rolled over the peace rally just as it was breaking up, quickly turning a sunny afternoon chill and dreary. The skinheads had jumped her when she rounded a corner, away from the others, headed for the bus and home.

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Black & White & Other Colors, Divergent Friends, Hard-Core Quaker, Progressive Friends, Quaker History, Quaker Theology, Remarkable Friends, Resistance

Getting Progressive With Sojourner Truth & Friends

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The Progressive Friends were a group that hasn’t yet got their props from Quaker historians. There isn’t space here for an outline of their fascinating history, except to say you can find out more here and here.

Pennsylvaia Progressive Friends Minute Book

But in sum, they started as liberal rebels in mid-1800s America, who took on a hidebound Hicksite Establishment. And they ended, invisibly but unmistakably, as the seedbed and founders of modern US liberal Quakerism. The fact that almost nobody knows this is a shame, but no surprise given the general ignorance of Quaker history among Quakers. (I’ll rant about that some other time.)

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Current Affairs, Hard-Core Quaker, Quaker Education, Quaker History, Quaker Theology, Resistance

Back To Class: Friends, “Our” Schools, And The Shock of Recognition

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Friends seminary, Manhattan New York
Friends Seminary, New York City

Settle in, guys and gals; this one is lengthy. But worth it. (It should be especially useful for recovering from an overdose of Supreme Court hearings.)

In a couple of earlier posts– here and also here — many months ago, I mentioned discussions of class as a factor that complicated self-understanding and community-building among Friends today, and promised to return to them at some point.

This is one of those points, precipitated by another New York Times report back  in 2011, describing tensions between some Friends in New York City and an expensive private school, Friends Seminary, which adjoins and shares facilities with the Fifteenth Street Meeting in Manhattan. It seems there are New York Friends who say that ties with the school should be cut. This saga is part of the background to the current issue at the school over the firing of its only remaining Quaker teacher. Continue reading Back To Class: Friends, “Our” Schools, And The Shock of Recognition →

Current Affairs, Ecumenical & Interfaith, Resistance, Signs of the Times, Social Justice, War & Peace

Beethoven’s Message to Guantanamo — And To Us

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BeethovenMy musical hero Beethoven  (born around this date in 1770; baptized on December 17; died 1827) wrote only one opera, Fidelio.

In it, instead of rhapsodizing about Teutonic gods, or killing off ill-fated sopranos, his story dealt with a group of political prisoners who win their freedom from an oppressive system, mainly through the heroism of a woman.

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Agni ad Bellum/ The Lamb's War, Current Affairs, Fire This Time, Resistance, Signs of the Times, Uncategorized

Dog Days Weekend Read: Hear The War Prophet: Chris Hedges

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Chris Hedges covered wars close up for fifteen years.

Chris Hedges has been there. A war correspondent for many years, he carries a burden of closely-observed horror for which the term PTSD pales. You can see it in the hollows around his eyes.

Chris Hedges has also been through hell with religion. He’s not “religious” now in any conventional sense. Yet he’s not “anti-religious” either. He can’t leave the subject alone. In books and columns, he delivers impassioned oracles. One of his recent books is, “I Don’t Believe In Atheists.” Continue reading Dog Days Weekend Read: Hear The War Prophet: Chris Hedges →