QuakerSpeak

11/07/2024

Many Friends—and many Quaker meetings—have struggled to articulate, even to themselves, a clear response to the relentless violence against Palestinians after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.

Steve Chase describes his personal journey from instinctive support of Israel to a recognition of the Palestinian cause—and his meeting's difficult but fruitful path toward a unified response to the conflict.

Many Friends—and many Quaker meetings—have struggled to articulate, even to themselves, a clear response to the relentless violence against Palestinians…

10/31/2024

We were saddened last week to learn of the death of Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Dominican priest whose 1971 book A Theology of Liberation has transformed not just Catholic thought over the last half-century, but many other religions' understandings of the centrality of social justice—including Quakers.

"We do have the opportunity to create something that resembles the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth," as Friend Olivia Chalkley explained liberation theology in this 2020 interview, and we can accomplish that goal by "acting not out of greed but out of solidarity with every other human based on an understanding of the inherent sanctity of every human life."

“The original teachings of Jesus are all about wealth redistribution and fighting greed and uplifting the poor,” Olivia Chalkley says.…

10/24/2024

"Whenever there are these attempts to think about alternative ways to live, or to create an economic system that is less destructive and more just, there's very often this response that 'that's impossible,'" Alicia Mendonca-Richards tells us. "That any changes that would make our way of life more sustainable and more caring and more equal would cause the international economic order to collapse. And that's just not true!"

“Whenever there are these attempts to think about alternative ways to live, or to create an economic system that is…

10/17/2024

"Friends sometimes ask me, 'Well, how could Quakers have done this? Didn’t Quakers at that time see that of God in Indigenous people?'" Paula Palmer told us last year. "I think they did see that of God in individuals. What they didn’t see was the intrinsic value of Indigenous cultures as a whole. And that’s because they were blinded by White supremacy.... by their certainty that their way of life was superior."

“Most Quakers still don’t know our history as participants in this enterprise of forced assimilation of Native people,” Paula Palmer…

10/10/2024

Benjamin Lay was born in 1682, a third-generation Quaker when three generations of Quakers was all there was. "He was a much more ardent and more radical Quaker than either his grandparents or his parents," says Lay's biographer, Marcus Rediker—possessing a zeal that harkened back to the very beginnings of the Religious Society of Friends.

Horrified by the violence he saw being perpetrated against enslaved people in early 18th-century Barbados—and equally horrified by the participation of Friends in that violence—Benjamin arrived in colonial Philadelphia a fervent abolitionist. "He believed that people were sleepwalking," Marcus explains, "that they weren't awake and alert to the injustice that was going on all around them. And he thought it was his job to wake them up."

[Marcus Rediker] In the 1650s, Quakers were extremely radical. They would disrupt meetings, They would go naked for a sign, as they put it. They believed in acting out their ideas. Benjamin Lay was born in Copforde England, unusually for his time since he was born in 1682, a third generation of Quak...

10/03/2024

Next week marks one year since the October 7 Hamas attacks which prompted the Israeli government to launch an extended military counterstrike that, at this writing, has killed somewhere between 40,000 and 45,000 Palestinians, with nearly another 100,000 wounded.

With that anniversary in mind, and thinking too of the recent attacks by Israel on Hezbollah in Lebanon and by Iran on Israel, our thoughts turned to the anonymous Friend who shared her thoughts on pacifism and Gaza earlier in the year.

This week’s guest, who wishes to remain anonymous, describes herself as “a pacifist, a poet, a Jewish grandmother, [and] a bubbe.”…

09/26/2024

Paula Christophersen recalls how, when she first walked into a Quaker meeting as a "spiritual but not religious" person just over half a decade ago, "It almost felt as if... this faith I was discovering fell cleanly through my head and into my heart."

Paula Christophersen recalls how, when she first walked into a Quaker meeting in the UK, as a “spiritual but not…

09/19/2024

We spoke with George Lakey in the fall of 2020, when folks in the United States were concerned that Donald Trump might not accept the results of the presidential election if he lost. What could we do if that happened?

"If we’re talking about a possible coup, that’s not America’s experience," George said back then. "So we can’t do, 'Oh, I remember! We dealt with that 20 years ago!' No, nobody here remembers that."

Here we are, four years later.

"There's this possible constitutional crisis coming down the pike," warns Quaker peace activist George Lakey.

09/13/2024

"We know when someone is being really true and authentic," says singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer. "When someone puts their finger on the open palm of something true, it shakes the world just a little bit. And why would I want to write any other way? Why would I want to be any other way?"

In this video, Carrie describes how Quaker worship has become a reliable path to that "deep and spiritual, sometimes mystical well."

You know, people have asked me, you know, “You are a musician, you’re a songwriter, and you make your life in sound and you attend a silent Quaker meeting. What’s with that?” You know, and I have to say that some of my best language has emerged out of the silence and the listening part of th...

09/05/2024

Many Friends, especially in the United States, have begun or are just about to begin a new school year, and our thoughts recently turned to a 2017 conversation with Tom Hoopes, who described his job as a world religions teacher at a Quaker school as "creating [a] safe, discursive space for people to ask into the sublime, into the mystical, into the beautiful, into the mysterious."

Often in a Friends school classroom, “the majority of people in the room are not Quaker, and there is no expectation that they should be.” But as Tom Hoopes

08/30/2024

We were fortunate to be able to attend the FWCC World Plenary Meeting in South Africa in early August, where we met Pradip Lamichhane, a member of Bhaktapur Evangelical Friends Church in Nepal.

Pradip was full of enthusiasm, and eager to discuss his prayer life. “Every morning, I wake up, I say, ‘Thank you, God, that’s all!'” he says. “Before going to bed: ‘Oh, thank you, God, very much, how lovely you are.'”

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08/16/2024

Cherice Bock recently spoke with us about the programmed worship at North Valley Friends Church, and how the format differs from the "silent" sort of meeting most people associate with Quakers. One of the key differences is the inclusion of song in worship services. "Music allows us to express different feelings," Cherice says, "and it's a way to express those feelings together as a community."

"Music can also be prayers," Cherice adds. "It can be cries of our heart. It can be ways that we express the desires that we have for connectedness with the Divine and with our community... It can inspire us to live in the ways that we would like to live."

When we went through the pandemic and we didn’t sing together for that whole time, that was something that I missed the most about meeting for worship. We can meet in silence, or we can listen to a message on Zoom, and you miss some of the being in-person part of that but it’s doable. But singin...

08/01/2024

"Prayer is my life," Lynette Davis tells us, and she means it—in addition to being a Quaker, she's also a member of an ecumenical community of women who have taken religious vows, and joins other sisters in formalized prayers several times a day.

The half dozen other Friends who shared details of their prayer lives aren't necessarily that hardcore, but they all incorporate contemplation and the effort to connect with Spirit into their routines to some degree.

My prayer is basically through meditation now. I think the humility of meditation is me praying. That’s my prayer. Just saying like, God, I ain’t got all the answers. I ain’t got…give me the strength. Let me sit back and listen to you. Keep me humble, keep me…that’s my prayer, you know? ...

07/25/2024

Greg Woods was born with a speech impediment and motor control issues. Growing up, his Quaker community was one of the few places he felt he could be himself, not defined by his disability. Later, in seminary, he considered whether his condition might be a gift from God, but then chose to look at the situation in a new light.

"It's not about what God did or did not do, but seeing myself in the body of Christ," Greg says in this 2017 interview. "Seeing that I am just an equal member in Christ’s body with all of my imperfections was really amazing to think about. And God is still using me and using my gifts despite my disability, and sometimes through my disability."

In reconciling his disability with his understanding of the nature of God, Quaker Greg Woods stopped questioning “what God did or did not do” when he started seeing himself as a part of the body of Christ.

07/18/2024

Sitting in his workshop, Henry Freeman describes how "settling in" to create one of his "Quaker kitchen knives" brings a feeling similar to meeting for worship: "During some of the processes, I'll shut my eyes and just go into my fingers, because it's all here," he explains, waggling his fingers, "and there's a connection with a reality that all of a sudden nobody else around knows."

As I started making knives, a real transformational moment was when I looked over in a corner and I had my dad’s old walking stick that I had inherited when he passed away. But then there was this other walking stick that he had that had broken, and I just kept it in the corner for several years. ...

07/12/2024

Morning worship at the fire circle at Opequon Quaker Camp proved to be a transformative experience for young Eli Phillips. "Like, the way that the wind rustles the leaves, that’s God or the Spirit," he reflected, years later. "The way the light comes through the trees, that’s the Spirit."

“I miss camp all the time, but I'm connected to people from camp to this day."

07/06/2024

“For me, it is impossible to think of Quakerism without George Fox,” says Thomas Hamm, a recently retired Quaker history scholar at Earlham College and the editor of the Penguin Classics anthology of essential Quaker writings. “It would be like Buddhism without the Buddha, Islam without Muhammad.”

In this video, Thomas guides us through the turbulent religious landscape of seventeenth-century England and explains why the personal spiritual revelations Fox experienced had such an enormous impact.

https://quakerspeak.com/video/the-history-of-george-fox/

06/27/2024

“Stories have power to reach beyond our brain," Cai Quirk explained in this 2021 interview, "and into our emotions and our bodies and our souls, our hearts, and in that way they can connect us in deeper ways to each other, to ourselves, to the earth.”

"My art," Cai Quirk says, "is an expression of my faith."