A Friendly Letter

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 . . .

Was George Fox A Liar? (Alas, The Answer Is Yes.)

For enthusiastic new Friends, it’s something of a sobering rite of passage to learn that many of the great names among the founders are not reliable witnesses in their own cause. However, careful historians have long since proven this to be the case.
One of them was H. Larry Ingle.
H. Larry Ingle, who summer & winter was usually first in line at the local store in Chattanooga where the Sunday New York Times was delivered.

Larry is now retired from a long career teaching history, mainly at the University of Tennessee – Chattanooga. Sometime before 1994, he went to London, and padded down the stone steps of the large Library at Friends House (an imposing structure sometimes dubbed the Quaker Vatican), into the half-lit depths where the earliest Quaker manuscripts and publications were stored. Then he began looking at many of the pamphlets and broadsides from the first generation of Friends. And soon he had made a remarkable discovery:
In the 1650s and 1660s, books and pamphlets were printed on large sheets containing many pages, on both sides. The big sheets were folded into book form, sewed up on one edge for binding, and then the folds on the other edges of the pages were trimmed or slit open for reading.

1666-quaker-pamphlet-women-speaking Except that Larry found many important pamphlets from that period on the shelf with the pages un-slit – that is, they had never been opened or read, not in three hundred-plus years.
For Larry this was deja vu all over again. In the early 1980s he visited a major Quaker archive, and accidentally discovered that none of the original documents about the Great Quaker Separation in 1827 had ever been looked at — which meant that all the available books on the schism were based on third- or fourth-hand sources, and quotes from each other.
This was a stunning example of scholarly laziness and timidity — and an opening for an energetic historian who was not afraid of work. The result was Ingle’s first major book, Quakers In Conflict (1986), today the standard history of the schism.

Transphobia’s “scriptural” roots: The Bible Is Better Than That

Transphobia: The Bible Is Better Than That North Carolina’s odious “Bathroom Bill,” HB2 has been pushed out of the spotlight for the moment, while the crazy 2016 election plays itself out. I can understand that. But HB2 and it’s ilk will be back, and it’s still on my mind. In particular, I’ve been trying to … Continue reading Transphobia’s “scriptural” roots: The Bible Is Better Than That →

Happy Quaker Day

Happy Quaker Day So I guess I’ll have a bowl & a bump & toddle (or stagger) off to Meeting. Bust me some Quaker rhymes, Jack!