Category Archives: Signs of the Times

Now Online: “Quaker Theology” #33 — 20th Anniversary Issue

Theology as self- and group-defense was part of our 1999 response to the opening query about “Why theology”? It was current then; it was imminent when I visited that school; and it is immediate now.
But I also insisted there were positive reasons to write, read and talk about theology, which we defined as

“the ongoing work of self-examination and definition which any living faith community faces. This ever-unfinished work is at the center of Quaker Theology’s efforts; indeed, it provides us with our working definition of theology, which is: disciplined reflection and continuing conversation about individual and communal religious experience. It seems to us that such disciplined reflection is part of our religious duty. After all, in Matthew 22:37, Jesus includes in the first Great Commandment the imperative to love the Lord “with all your mind”; we think Friends today could do better at following this call.”

These positive reasons for theology are also still relevant, if seemingly sidelined by the rush of current events. It’s often been a struggle to make room for it, but we’ve worked at it.

Read more →

Sierra Cascades YM: “Our New Thing” versus the “Same Old Thing”?

Promising to reform this traditional system, even while coping with being purged by it, is not a new response. When the group that became  “Hicksites” were pushed out of Philadelphia Yearly meeting in 1827, their initial leadership insisted that they would preserve the recorded ministerial elite system — only they would run it better, less oppressively, than had the rival Orthodox junta. 

And maybe they did, for a short while. But before long, internal agitation surfaced among Hicksites about rising issues like women’s rights, and abolitionism, with the specter of civil war on the horizon. And it was shortly clear that the Hicksite recorded establishment did not like such reforming notions one whit more than did their Orthodox rivals. Soon enough there began among Hicksite meetings what I have called the Great Purge: hundreds of Friends deemed to be, in Kershner’s words, “divisive voices” or “only troublemakers,” who were silenced, marginalized or disowned.

But this time many victims stayed and, pardon the expression, fought back.

Read more →

Ashley Wilcox to Liberal Quakers: “I’m coming to uproot, to pull down, and destroy”

But Jeremiah was not the invader. Instead, like the other major Hebrew prophets, he was a kind of mail carrier, delivering God’s message to a generally resistant people:

“Behold, I [God] have put my words in thy mouth  [Jeremiah]. . . Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak unto them all that I command thee (1: 10, 17) . . . .”  

Speak those words, Jeremiah; God (and Babylon) will take care of the rest.

However, Wilcox in her Guilford sermon, did not pick up Jeremiah’s messenger role, but rather that of invading Babylon. She repeated the operative phrase (1:10), but with herself as subject: “I [God] have this day set thee [Wilcox] over the nations and over the kingdoms [mainly unprogrammed liberal Quakers] to uproot, to pull down, and to destroy” what she [and God] have determined to be wrong about them. 

And, she explained, the terrible sin she is being dispatched to uproot and destroy is their practice, now a century old, of not recording ministers. Once that demolition is done, the recording system is what will be replanted in its place.

Wilcox insisted that the end of recording, and resistance to reviving it, has done much harm to liberal Quakerism, and to many in its ranks who are seeking recorded status, especially women. 

Read more →