Category Archives: Signs of the Times

Is The End Near? The Carolina-Harold Camping Connection

After all this bluster, one thing is clear: these Harold Camping wannabes may be fooling somebody else, but they’re not fooling me, or many others anymore. All that talk of withholding funds, walking out, jumping ship, taking a hike, catching the Rapture Bus and all that has been so much hot air and yada yada.

And maybe this time the shouters will be met, not with shudders of terror and consternation, but the giggles and titters they richly deserve. Indeed, will anyone be bold enough to laugh in their faces? (I bet I could get odds on that in Vegas; but Faith & Practice is against gambling.)

Indeed, the vacuity of it all is so clear that this is a good time for a bit of an autopsy: What accounts for so much empty blather? Here are some possibilities:

1. Simple bullying: It seems evident some figured that at the loud threat of an exodus, YM officials would be so terrified they would hurriedly push all the targeted meetings out the door, like the king of Nineveh harking to the prophet Jonah, to placate the messengers of an angry Deity’s wrath. Certainly there’s been plenty self-righteous posturing and shamelessly abusive behavior. Or

2. Too much time spent looking in the mirror . . . .

BREAKING: PRO-GAY Oregon Meeting Expelled by Northwest YM

West Hills Friends in Portland, Oregon has been expelled from Northwest Yearly Meeting NWYM) because of its welcoming stance toward LGBTs.

The expulsion, called a “release,” was made public on July 24, in a letter from the NWYM Board of Elders, over the name of Ken Redford, the Board’s Clerk.
The expulsion was not entirely unexpected. West Hills Friends (WHF) had been placed “under discipline” by the Elders almost two years ago, after it refused to withdraw or revise its statements affirming LGBT persons and relationships from its website.

“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.