A Friendly Letter

The Northwest Gay Expulsion Impasse: Is A Break In Sight?

The Northwest Gay Expulsion Impasse: Is A Break In Sight? At its September business meeting, West Hills Friends (WHF) in Portland Oregon considered a statement accepting its expulsion from Northwest Yearly Meeting (NWYM) for having become a LGBT-welcoming congregation. If approved, the statement would be issued jointly with NWYM. The decision to expel West Hills was made … Continue reading The Northwest Gay Expulsion Impasse: Is A Break In Sight? →

Free Speech, Islamophobia & The Murder of Innocents

I’m mindful of, and disturbed by the steady stream of articles I see decrying there decline of free speech on and around U.S. universities. Many of these come from rightwing pundits; but others come from worried but otherwise progressive observers.

A Carolina memorial to three victims of anti-Muslim violence, February 2015.
I’ve held back from joining the fray, mainly because it’s almost twenty years since I worked on a college campus, and it’s way too easy to succumb to hand-wringing fads and facile generalizations about “kids these days”; to moan about how academia is abandoning rational discourse, and its millennial occupants are all going to hell in a handbasket woven from organic fair trade dried kale.

Perhaps it’s so; but how would I know that? I live near some large campuses, but don’t hang out there.

But then a week or so ago, an advocacy group I’m part of was asked to sign on to a letter. The missive, written by Manzoor Cheema, for the Movement to Ed Racism and islamophobia, called for a lecture series in Chapel Hill NC, to be shut down. The letter’s money quote was:

“we urge Extraordinary Ventures to say no to the voices of hatred and bigotry. We request Extraordinary Ventures to cancel Diana West’s upcoming speech and the future lecture series by ICON.”

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.