A Friendly Letter

Dog Days True Quaker Stories: The Party That Went On Too Long

Much of my initial “information” about the Communist Party came from watching a TV show, “I Led Three Lives,” after we got a TV in mid-1952. The show started the next year and ran for more than a hundred episodes. It was inspired by the true-life career of Herbert Philbrick of Boston.

For years, Philbrick was a seemingly ordinary white collar office worker. But he was also a secret member of the Communist Party, spying and planning to overthrow the American government — and even more secretly, a double agent helping the FBI foil the Communist schemes. In 1952, he published a best-selling book about all this; and Hollywood jumped on the story line.

(In an episode I sadly missed, one such –fictional– plot was about how the party was going to turn vacuum cleaners into handheld missile launchers. Sound, um, far-fetched? But J. Edgar Hoover approved that episode, as he did all of them, so it must have been thrilling.)

Now I know much better how, in the late 1940s and into the 1960s, “the Communists” were a very big deal for Americans. Hiss’s two trials marked a major turning point in U.S. public opinion, toward a hard anti-communism, of the sort I grew up absorbing like milk on cornflakes.

A Review of “Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey”

And now comes, in this effort to understand Quakerism, “Our Life Is Love,” by Marcelle Martin.

In the book, which she says is based on long study and wide personal engagement, she draws on “acquaintance with the lives of seventeenth-century Quakers, combined with the experiences of dedicated Quakers today.” From this mix she believes she has “unveiled ten essential elements in the process” of Quaker spiritual life.

She chose the term “elements” carefully, insisting that the ten features are not to be taken as stages in a definite procession, or prescribed rungs on a spiritual ladder. Nevertheless, she begins from her own early sense of religious longing, as the first element, and the ten are grouped into three categories of Awakening, Convincement and Faithfulness, which certainly appear progressive, and reasonably so.

To illustrate her ten elements, she draws in quotes from numerous Friends, from early times and now. She also labors to include among them voices from across the theological spectrum and around the Quaker world, including Friends of color, Latin Americans and Africans. Linguistic and cultural differences make this effort feel strained at some points, but it’s a noble one, and basic to developing a Quakerism for our time, and not just for our local parochial place.

Quakerism As Therapy?? A Good Idea? Good Religion??

Here are excerpts from an article describing “The Influence of Psychoanalysis and Popular Psychology on Quaker Thought & Practice: An Exploratory Survey,” by Jacob Stone. Stone is both a longtime Friend and a retired psychologist, who had a long career in human services and human services education in higher education, as well as serving as an ethicist and ethics trainer.

Stone raises the curtain on a well-established phenomenon particularly at the liberal end of this constituency. Yet it’s one that is hardly ever remarked on, except in passing: the pervasive influence of pop psychology and the morphing of “spirituality” (also previously known as “religion”) into a kind of therapy equivalent.

Michelle & Larycia: Two Remarkable Women Speak

The uproar that led to the firing of Larycia Hawkins was what we call a total flustercluck, which surfaced so many ugly currents that swirl through the evangelical constituency that the oppression bean counters had to scramble to keep up: there was race (of course), but also gender (& single too, i.e., not under a man’s “headship”, and — dare I say it — attractive); she’s also an accomplished intellectual; staunchly Christian, yet theologically adventurous; well-spoken, vocal and assertive.
“Wheaton College cannot scare me into walking away from the truth that all humans, Muslims, the vulnerable, the oppressed … are all my sisters and brothers and I am called by Jesus to walk with them.”
Michelle Obama spoke today (10-13-2016) in New Hampshire, and her speech will, I believe, go down as a landmark of humanist political rhetoric. She was angry, she was eloquent, she was unanswerable & unstoppable, and the crowd (sounded like students) went totally bonkers.

Yes, it was a campaign speech. But I’ve left out the parts that urge her listeners to vote for a particular candidate; because that’s not what I want to highlight here.

I want to pass the heart of the speech, a woman speaking to other women, and men, about the issues that have leapt to the fore in the past few days. You know what they are. But she says it best:

The VEEP Debate: Style vs Substance

The VEEP debate: If all that mattered was “style” and presentation, Mike Pence ran away with it. If that’s the ball game, call him the winner.

But I wasn’t much interested in the “optics” or horse race aspects. Instead, I focused on the substance of what I heard in Pence’s smoother, better-packaged comments.

And that “substance” amounted to a whole lot of trouble, for the nation and the world. Let me illustrate, by edited pieces from the transcript. From the angle of substance rather than showmanship, a very different picture emerges. Here are a few snapshots . . .