Category Archives: Signs of the Times

Sample A Quaker Mystery: “Murder Among Friends”

Valley State College is just north of Winchester, about half a mile west of Interstate 81. The campus is compact and cozy, with nondescript red brick buildings ranged around a lush green oval lined with tall old oaks and maples.

“Welcome All‑Friends Conference,” read the hand‑painted sign at the north entrance, with a black arrow pointing toward Mott Hall for Registration.

“It was started by Quakers from Opequon Creek Meeting, in 1867,” I was telling Eddie as we turned in. “To train young women who were going South to teach former slaves. Lots of them went. After Reconstruction the meeting turned it into a normal school, for schoolteachers. It closed in the Depression, then the state picked it up.”

I pointed across the oval, toward a tree‑covered rise. “The Meetinghouse is over there, behind the trees. It goes back to before the American Revolution. Here’s Mott Hall.”

“That’s Lucretia Mott, I hope?” Eddie asked.

“Yep. This may be one of the few public buildings in the valley not named after a treasonous defender of chattel slavery or a segregationist governor. Not that I’m prejudiced about the Old Dominion. I’ll open the trunk.”

With the obligatory nametags soon pinned on our shirts, we were quickly assigned to a room on the dormitory’s third floor, and lugged our bags up the stairs.

From the doorway the room looked like an optical illusion, with two of everything: desks, beds, dressers and closets, arranged in sequence and exactly opposite each other.

I dropped my suitcase, flopped down on one of the beds and scanned the conference schedule, printed on a pink sheet in small type, while Eddie unpacked his bag. “There’s a steering committee meeting going on now, in the auditorium,” I noted. “I should get down to it, since I’m technically a member. You could come, too; it’s an open session. Hey, what’s that?”

I had glanced up and seen Eddie pulling out what looked like a sawed‑off baseball bat from his bag. He grinned and tossed it at me.

“It’s an authentic family heirloom and homophobia deflector,” he said. “Got it at a yard sale outside Pittsburgh, cost me a buck. Look on the other side.”

Survival & Revival: The Day The Smiles Are Well-Earned

This commemoration, while very personal, was not only about closure in Christine’s life. The fact that many women unknown to Christine or any of us showed up to join in as part of their own survival and revival, and underlining the fact of domestic violence as an ongoing issue in U.S. military culture.
And the 2007 event was not the end. Many more awful cases of domestic violence surfaced at and around Fort Bragg in my remaining years there (til November 2012). And the members of the Fayetteville NOW chapter, who had worked on this issue for man-years, and were powerfully moved by Christine’s witness, decided to make an annual event of laying a wreath at Beryl; Mitchell’s grave. They settled on early December, on or close to the day she was murdered.

And so they have. Each year since, in rain, in sleet, or cloudy and chill wind, they have gathered, sometimes few, sometimes more, and laid a wreath and taken both comfort and strength from this quiet ritual.

“Trumbo” — A Menace Is Banished & Returns

And here’s one more big reason to see “Trumbo” and tell everyone: the Hollywood blacklist may now be history, or even, as it is between the flines here, low farce. But the kind of threat to free expression and public intelligence it spawned has not gone away. . . .
Trumbo” avoids the temptation to make any cheap parallels to our current plight; but they are implicit throughout.
If we’d learned anything from the Blacklist, “Trumbo” would be no more than a well-done period piece. But instead, it’s a compelling tract for the times. And if we don’t get the point now, it could end up being of timeless value.
Until they get around to banning it.

Pauli Murray – A Saint For Our Time (And My Neighborhood)

And who is Pauli Murray, a few of you may ask?
She was — and is — many things. One of them is my neighborhood saint.
Yes, she spent most of her childhood just a couple blocks from my place, in a house we’ll see in a moment.
But neighborhood bragging rights are only a small part of it. A major exhibit about her is up at a nearby place called The Scrap Exchange (a very interesting and unique project itself; but that’s another story), and yesterday I re-visited it, with some folks from my Carolina posse.

Scrap-Exchange-sign
The Scrap Exchange: google it and come visit!
We were all completely smitten by her, yet again. So let’s get a few facts out there:
Pauli Murray was born in 1910, in Baltimore, but soon afterward orphaned, she came to Durham NC and was raised by aunts and grandparents.
Thereafter, in her life she was, among other things (hang on to your hats!) —
— a pioneering civil rights crusader, who had a big hand in the behind the scenes work on the landmark 1954 Brown Supreme Court desegregation decision;

— a pioneering modern American feminist, even if many feminist-identified folks never heard of her (tsk tsk if you haven’t); she was even a founder of the National Organization of Women;

— a pioneering women’s lawyer, who helped put gender equality in the great 1964 Civil Rights Act;

Imp-Dude-Crusader-Cropped
“Imp”; ‘Dude”; “Crusader”; how was Pauli Murray to fit these identities together?

— a pioneer in bending and busting the boundaries of gender; kind of a lesbian, kind of not, kind of trans, kind of not, all and none of the above;

–and a pioneer in religion, the first black American woman ordained a priest in the Episcopal church; and

— yes, as of the summer of 2012, eighteen years after her death in 1985, she was declared a saint by the Episcopal church (her gender nonconformity notwithstanding).

That’s for starters. (Sorry if I said “pioneering” so many times, but that’s just what Pauli was for most of her life.)

Why Expel A Gay-Friendly Oregon Meeting? Here Are 8 Answers.

Part of Rosedale’s letter was what was now becoming boilerplate: “While no process involving human effort can ever be perfect (especially when the results create pain for some) we affirm the Board of Elders’ process and their conclusion to uphold current Faith and Practice resulting in West Hills Friends Church removal from fellowship.” They get an extra point for saying “removal” instead of “release.”

Rosedale-EFC-LogoMore revealing was a set of four questions, with answers, attached to their letter, summarizing their view of the authority relationships involved:

Questions concerning West Hill’s actions:

1. Are all members and local churches required to accept the Faith and Practice as prescriptive? Yes.

2. Does the F&P allow a local church to create or form doctrine?
No. The only body given authority to change doctrine is the Faith and Practice committee of the yearly meeting.

3. Does the F&P give Elders authority to oversee doctrinal disputes and to discontinue churches? Yes.

4. Does the F&P require the Elders to follow a particular procedure in declaring the issue is shattering to the Yearly Meeting, or in discontinuing a church, other than what is mentioned in [two sections of F&P]? No.

Note here that questions are only asked about West Hills actions; the Elders aren’t subject to interrogation. Further, the relationship described here is strictly top-down.

And from a liberal Friend’s perspective, it is remarkable how completely absent from this formulation is any notion of continuing revelation coming from anywhere except the top. However, this arrangement, and the theology underlying it, is consistent with the evangelical view of the church.