Category Archives: Signs of the Times

“Shut Up And Go Home!” – Echoes in Kenya & Quaker Carolina

What’s Obama in Kenya got to do with North Carolina Quakers and their current troubles?

Stay with me.

First, Kenya has a probably the biggest Quaker population of any nation.

And the official position of its leadership supports both the Kenyan anti-gay laws and the biblical interpretations that they are largely based on.

Actually, the official Quaker position there goes further than Kenyan laws. Gays can get up to 14 years in prison for having sex there; but the Kenyan Quaker leadership insists that:

“God outlawed all homosexuality and bestiality as sexual perversion that should not be tolerated. All sexual perversions were worthy of death, indicating their loath sameness before God. . . . Modernizing Christianity to meet our own selfish desires is immoral. The God of yesterday is the same today and tomorrow and His commandments have remained and will remain forever.“

“Worthy of death.” Spin it any way you want: that’s hard core.

There are numerous ties between Kenyan Quakers and Friends in NCYM.

Looking Back at a Unique Woman Author — “Go Set a Watchman”: My Review

Surrounded by her former peers, the painfully uncomfortable Jean Louise is peppered with questions about her life in New York City, which to many of them might as well be on Mars: how can she stand it? All those people, including “Negroes,” on the loose. The noise, the constant hubbub, the rudeness and ugly accents. Not to mention the fact that she’s (still, at 26!) single there, and working.

Jean Louise speaks up tepidly for her urban existence, but thinks to herself more candidly about its pluses and minuses.

In truth, she often resents the patronizing attitudes of many New Yorkers toward other, benighted regions, especially the South. She bridles at how so many of them, with the smug assurance of big-city liberals that hasn’t changed much since Lee wrote in the 1950s, feel they know all the answers for problems there, even if their nostrums are no more than bien-pensant slogans, based on little or no knowledge or experience.

Yet she puts up with this annoyance because New York offers her a compensation she has to have, and can’t hope to find in her hometown: anonymity, and the space created by the indifference of the mass, in which to continue seeking her identity and destiny.
If that sounds pompous, the clumsiness of expression is mine, not Lee’s; but that’s what it was. Later, after the shattering confrontations with Atticus and ex-beau Henry, there seems no way forward for Jean Louise but to climb on the train and head back up north, alone. This reader was relieved that she had somewhere to go for refuge, someplace where she could at least breathe, and be herself, even as a stranger in a sea of strangers.

In Manhattan she could bask in being ignored, free of family and community expectations, no longer carry the stigma as the renegade runaway daughter who abandoned a “good family,” and get on with the long work of becoming a writer.

Change Comes to Timeless Olney & Friends Music Camp

The shale oil/gas drillers are aggressively seeking out and buying up oil rights to properties near and far in this shale-rich region.
Including Barnesville.

Including Olney Friends School.
And thus has crumbled the strongest, most comforting illusion I have nourished about this Quietist Quaker oasis, perched on its ridge, but shielded on three sides by woods, and facing a pond like a moat on the other.
Here the school has stood at one end for five generations, clinging to its past while being pushed into a turbulent present; and at the other end of the long green lawn is the big, venerable Stillwater Meetinghouse, the seat of Ohio Yearly Meeting- Conservative.
Both the yearly meeting & the school have been offered money –big money– for fracking rights here under their ridge. Both have said no.
So far.

Anti-Disestablishmentarianism: The Word for Southern Marriage Holdouts

Anti-Disestablishmentarianism: The Word for Southern Marriage HoldoutsDo kids still joke about learning to spell “anti-disestablishentarianism”? I used to think it was a fake, something made up, like Mary Poppins’s “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” But no! It was real. And in fact, I just realized that TODAY, for the very first time ever, I can use the term in … Continue reading Anti-Disestablishmentarianism: The Word for Southern Marriage Holdouts →

Conscience in Mississippi; Grandstanding In Alabama

A Circuit Clerk in Mississippi resigned her post rather than issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.
Linda Barnette said in a letter of resignation, effective on June 30, 2015, that

“The Supreme Court’s decision violates my core values as a Christian,” she wrote. “My final authority is the Bible. I cannot in all good conscience issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples under my name because the Bible clearly teaches that homosexuality is contrary to God’s plan and purpose for marriage and family. . . .”
Acquaintances said Barnette’s husband is a pastor who worked with Billy Graham Ministries for many years.
“I choose to obey God rather than man,” Barnette wrote.

Linda-Barnette
Linda Barnette, former Circuit Clerk of Grenada County, Mississippi.

I cite this letter to pay Barnette public respect. She had been Circuit Clerk, for 24 years. But she followed her conscience, peacefully but clearly, out the door.
That’s what Christians and Quakers are supposed to do.

Her witness is honorable. It is also rare. And it won’t slow the issuance of same sex marriage licenses in the state by much, if at all.