A Friendly Letter

Thoughts on Quaker Storytelling: A Crucial Art & Witness

Quaker storytelling efforts seem to have dwindled in the past generation or two. Where, for instance, are the stories of COs in World War Two – I mean stories which ought to be familiar to most well-informed Friends? Or those of Quaker COs during the Vietnam War – of which I am one? Have any of us heard any of those? And most of us have been told about Lucretia Mott and the Underground Railroad; but what about the Quaker men and women who took part in the modern civil rights and feminist movements? There were plenty of them; where are their stories?

One story I heard some years ago was told by the woman who lived it, Marion Anderson, a Friend from Michigan. It was hilarious as well as audacious, because it described how she managed to walk right in on a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon during the Vietnam War and give them all antiwar leaflets, much to their surprise.

I’m not talking here only about children’s stories. Adults need these stories too, told in adult formats. Today, adults may need them even more, because we’re so fully immersed in this mass media culture. But many of these stories, I’m afraid, are at serious risk of being lost. They are not being told, or even collected. And to lose them , I submit, would be a tragedy, it would mean losing part of our Quaker identity.

A Quaker Meditation: Hating the Good News?

Thursday morning December 13, an Indiana teenager allegedly grabbed a rifle and a pistol, and forced someone to drive him to a school less than a mile from his home. Five hundred-plus students were inside.

Meantime, somebody (later confirmed it was his mom) called to warn the school. Staff there ordered a lockdown, which seems to have been completed just in time.

The cops were alerted and also got there in time; and though the boy shot his way into the building, he heard resource officers in pursuit and soon felt cornered in a stairwell. He fired at the officers, they fired back, and then he was found in the stairwell dying of a gunshot wound, reportedly self-inflicted.

It was all over in about three minutes.

Friends Seminary – Fired Teacher Will Return

Frisch is about as far from being “Nazi friendly” as you could want. Although he’s a longtime Quaker, his ancestors were European and Jewish, and some were lost in the Holocaust. He doesn’t need a “diversity officer” to brief him on all that. Nevertheless, he was canned within a couple weeks. In a letter to students, the principal, Bo Lauter, wrote, “Our students know that words and signs of hate and fear have no place at Friends . . . .”

But in fact there was much more diversity of view at FS about whether Frisch’s obtuse angle quip constituted “words and signs of hate.” Frisch’s firing set off a firestorm: petitions on his behalf were signed by hundreds of students, and hundreds of alumni (after all, he had taught at FS for 34 years without any complaints; he knew lots of alumni). There was even a sit-in.

Dog Days Think Piece: Do We Miss the WASPs? Do We Need a New “Establishment”?

In the December 5, 2018 New York Times, conservative writer Ross Douthat made his column a paean to the lost American Establishment that George H.W. Bush, who was being buried that day with much fanfare, represented (to him): “Why We Miss the WASPS,” he undertook to explain. He said we can describe Bush nostalgia as … Continue reading Dog Days Think Piece: Do We Miss the WASPs? Do We Need a New “Establishment”? →