Category Archives: Stories – From Life & Elsewhere

New: A Religious Autobiography From “Interesting Times”

My friend & colleague Stephen Angell read my new book “Meetings,” and here’s what he said:

A vivid, lively, kaleidoscopic self-portrait of a fascinating Catholic-turned-Quaker journalist, writer and activist. Chuck Fager’s autobiography is one of the best that I’ve seen of an aspiring nonviolent revolutionary’s Life in the Sixties. (The early seventies are covered, too, in which he and other radicals took a more conservative turn.) Fager seems to be everywhere, providing revealing insights from interviews with Phil Berrigan and E. F. Schumacher, among others. He also provides wonderful portraits of Quakers who made their mark on the world and who deserve not to be forgotten, Sam Levering, Morris Mitchell, and Louis Alger, among them. Even topics such as “how I came to love the Bible” are presented in a sprightly and thought-provoking fashion; one of his unforgettable characters, the Prophet Jeremiah, hasn’t been alive in thousands of years!

Happy 188th Birthday Johannes Brahms!

Brahms’ music is not only beautiful, often profound, and richly enjoyable. It also saves lives:

The author William Styron is one example. Deep in the pit of depression in 1985, Styron came to the point of carefully planning to kill himself, with a shotgun, in a secluded spot near his home. But when he was driving, Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody came on the radio. [**Note to grammar cops: I KNOW it’s supposed to be “Brahms’s”; but that construction both looks and sound dumb to me, and I choose to ignore it here.]

The melancholy beauty of this brief piece so touched Styron that he turned around, drove home, put away the shotgun and checked into a hospital. And he survived. His concise memoir of that ordeal, Darkness Visible, is an unforgettable reading experience.

How Do Quakers Choose To Die–And Live?

Peg was 85, a longtime activist Friend, with numerous arrests to her record. And last fall she seemed ready to continue working for her various causes.

But when she announced to her meeting, in a special called session, that her next witness would be her last — well, you need to read the pieces to gauge the impact.

Spoiler Alert: Atticus Finch Isn’t Perfect. (I Can Live With That. Can You?)

I’ll hold off on a pre-emptive literary judgment on the novel itself til I read it (counting down the hours); but as a slice drawn from actual history & life, the good Atticus/bad Atticus (or as I prefer, the Easy-Simple Atticus vs the Complex-More Human Atticus) is a no-brainer.

See, I’ve Been There – Done That. For instance (one of many) I learned long ago that the Martin Luther King I shared a jail cell with in Selma, Alabama, had earlier faked and plagiarized most of the dissertation that gained him the title of “Doctor.” And further, that this dauntless crusader against the public immorality of American racism & militarism had a private sexual morality that departed widely from his professed Christian values.

Norman Morrison’s Transcendent Language of Self-Immolation

On a chilly November day in 1965, a thirty-one year old Quaker pacifist named Norman Morrison, a father of three, left his home in Baltimore with his infant daughter Emily and drove forty miles to Washington, DC. Once there, as dusk settled over the capitol city, he drove to the Pentagon where he drenched himself in kerosene and struck a match on his shoe. It is not clear if he had handed Emily to someone standing nearby or had sat her down out of harms way. As Norman burned alive, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, looking out of his office window only yards away, was horrified. He watched as Pentagon attaches rushed to try to put out the flames, scorching themselves in the process.