Category Archives: Signs of the Times

Richard Nixon’s First Cover-Up: His Quaker Religion

A former Nixon speechwriter-turned newspaper columnist compared Nixon’s personality to a many-layered birthday cake: cut into his persona and there was layer after layer, after layer.
It’s a striking image. But historian Larry Ingle’s new book about Nixon’s religion left me with a very different visual sense: that I had been peering down a deep, dark well, then shining a small but sharp penlight into the depths, hoping to glimpse the reflection of water, but finally seeing only a distant, dry emptiness, with an accumulation of trash, the deposit of endless lies.
And without Ingle’s saying so flatly, I also got nearly as strong a sense from the book that Richard Nixon, the second Quaker president, learned his lying ways first from, of all people, his supposedly “sainted” mother.
What’s the evidence for this?

Carolina Quakers: Saturday Showdown at Pine Hill?

What does “Integrity” mean in relation to North Carolina Yearly Meeting of Friends?

Does it mean taking seriously the four times that Faith & Practice says that it is NOT a CREED and thinking for oneself? Or is it picking out a few phrases from it and trying to make them the “absolute authority” for an organized purge of officers, committees, and meetings–something that same Faith & Practice does NOT authorize anywhere??

Is it attacking meetings which have honest issues about the fairness of their treatment in the yearly meeting, and reflect that in the partial payment of askings?

Or is there integrity in making widespread public threats about withholding ALL askings as of April 15, 2015 unless there was a purge by that date of disfavored meetings — and then abandoning the threat when the deadline passes and it doesn’t work?

Is it shown in getting creeds from other Quaker branches, purchasing most study resources and programs from Baptists, ignoring practically every Quaker in history and almost all the yearly meeting programs (except, of course, Quaker Lake) — and then demanding that other meetings be forbidden from freely associating with other kinds of Quakers, on their own time, and with their own funds?

And is there integrity in pursuing heresy inside this yearly meeting while making detailed plans to secede and form a separate body, one which will abandon just about every Quaker distinctive there is?

Two Unforgettable Profiles In Courage: 1969

David McReynolds on why he wrote the “Coming Out” article in 1969: “those of us who were homosexual hid this fact when we spoke of the Gandhian principle of absolute truth. Yes, truth and honesty about everything … except our own lives, which were in violation of the laws, and about which we had to keep silent in order to speak the truth about war and peace, racism, capitalism. Truth about everything… except the one thing that could destroy us.
My article was an effort to be honest at last.”

Guilford College President Responds To “Endangered” Blog Post

Recently, we took concrete steps to align our expenses with current and anticipated revenues. But that is only the first phase of a community-wide, multi-year effort that will include revenue-generating initiatives under new and inspired enrollment and marketing leadership. We have a powerful story to tell

Guilford: Quaker College On The Endangered List?

— Guilford is 274 above the lowest of the Forbes Financial Grades list. Does hovering 24 places above the bottom 250 mean it has a thin cushion? Or a frayed and disintegrating safety net?
— Guilford is, to repeat Moody’s, “tuition dependent,” and in many ways in a “weak market position,” with “limited pricing power.”
— If the school doesn’t find at least 200 more full-time students to increase tuition income, can it absorb another round (or two) of staff cuts without spinning into the “death spiral”? (The projection for enrollment next year? Flat.)
— Its plight is very similar to that of scores of other small liberal arts colleges, all of whom face “increased competition from cheaper public higher education . . . .”