Category Archives: Signs of the Times

Does Scot Miller Have the Answer to American Quaker Decline?

But why on earth should any progressive throw over all that they’ve toiled so hard for to take up this new role?

Miller’s answer, in sum, is threefold:

1. Because Jesus said to, and if we’re to take him (and the Gospels) seriously, that’s what seriousness means;

2. Because it yields a different understanding of the world, and our place in it, one which is more true and promising; and

3. Because action from the bottom and at the margins has more impact than we can see with our media-distracted eyes & ears, especially if we can factor in the work of grace.

[Besides the Amish, the Catholic Worker movement is another useful model for comparison and study.]

The Road to Columbine – A True Story (Some names are changed)

We headed down the hall and out the door, going as far as we were allowed, to the plowed field, toward the creek. As we walked, watching out for muddy spots, a couple of things became clear to me: one was that Justin wasn’t kidding. He would want his revenge on Eddie, and it would be a bloody one. Another was that when the time came, I had to stand with him, just as he had stood with me in my face-off with Father Vince.
But how could I do that so it made a difference? Justin could flatten Eddie with one fist and me with the other; and where would that leave either of us?
Still feeling shaky, I spotted something in the grass by the creek. It was a length of two by four lumber, about two and a half feet long. It was damp from laying out there in the dew and rain, and that made it heavy. A notch had been cut out of one end, giving my hand a good grip on it, and it swung with a real heft to it.

I whacked it against a tree a few times. The blows were solid, tearing big gashes in the tree’s bark, and making my palm and fingers hurt. But I didn’t drop it. In fact, with each blow I felt stronger and swung harder, and harder at the tree.

And like an electric shock, an idea came to me.
This two by four was not just a piece of wood. It was an equalizer. Looking down at it, I stopped shaking. It could solve our problem with Justin: In my mind’s eye I could see how it would go down, as clearly as if it was actually happening:

The Deaths Of Racism, And Racism In Deaths

Helena then beckoned us through an opening in the low wall, into what seemed an empty field.
This plot was meant to be added to the cemetery (since UVA professors keep stubbornly falling short of immortality). But when archaeologists tested the ground, they discovered that it too was full of unmarked, and previously unknown graves.

The Poet Laureate of a Banned Black History Month! Langston Hughes–Sing us a bit of your famous Blues!

It’s Langston Hughes’s birthday (1902-1967). Known primarily as a poet, Hughes was a versatile writer: by his mid-twenties he had published challenging essays in national periodicals, and two books of poetry. I’m reading his first novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930, when he was 28.

This passage evokes a domestic scene in a small Kansas city, modeled on Lawrence, where Hughes spent several boyhood years. Hughes was proud of his humble roots, and the creativity it wrung from hardship, like the largely homemade blues songs by the itinerant laborer Jimboy. Here he has returned after a long absence seeking work. In Hughes’s prose, we can hear the poetry woven through it.

Quakers Getting on the DOWN Escalator

A change equally unorganized & unheralded, potentially as momentous at least for us is, I believe, underway in the U. S. liberal Quakerism I discovered in 1965 (after ditching pre-Vatican II Catholicism).

This change does not necessarily involve moving from physical places, but rather from one economic and class location to another.

When I found it, Liberal American Quakerism was a solidly middle class “sub-subculture,” nearly all white, with a heavy academic/educational tinge. (I acronym it “EMCWAQE”–“E” now as in “Ex,” or as vocalized, “EmQuake.”)

I don’t name EmQuake to flagellate anybody (or myself). After all, everybody & every group is conditioned/limited by its surroundings, so let’s just skip the trendy guilt-trips, which don’t fool anybody anyway, except sometimes us.

However, now in my 53nd year in this group, I see more & more of what’s been well-documented by economists/pollsters, etc. on a broader canvas, namely that these segments (the middle class part of EmQuake) are in a steady slide of downward mobility. We are not leaving our economic & class “homes” voluntarily, but like many of those in the Black Migration, being forced out.