Peter M. Leschak wrote the following in a review of Kathleen Stocking’s 1991 book, Letters from the Leelanau: Essays of People and Place: “All of us are watchers, but few are observers. Missing are the village elders and seers, the astute perceivers who interpreted life and effort through nature and the primal cycles. Kathleen Stocking is one of those seers, and she’s…

Friends,

The Quaker Universalist Fellowship blog has adjusted its July-September schedule of topics in order to allow more time for contributions from readers. We’ve also added a topic for September.

Please share the information below with anyone you know

who might like to write for Quaker Universalist Fellowship.

July- August 2015 — Quaker universalism and…

In a recent workshop on the Patriarchy at the Quaker resource center Pendle Hill, I met Chloe Schwenke, a woman I had come in contact with a year or so earlier at a queer Quaker conference. At first, I have to say that she fooled me. I believed her to be a cisgender woman, but was in fact a transwoman. That was merely a clueless…

What is wrong with this picture? I looked out at a field of blooming clover and was struck by what I did not see…bees. No honeybees, no bumblebees, no wild bees of any species. No buzzing…silence but for the songbirds in the nearby trees.

What is wrong with this picture? This from an NBC article: Honeybees don’t just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest…

I admit I didn’t hear the phrase “step up, step back” until I was twenty-four years old. It was used in the context of the Anti-Oppression/Anti-Racism training of a group of young people of which I was a member. Put simply, it is a knowledge that men and women ought to have equal weight in group discussions. This is…

We had spent the whole day, the whole conference, really, attaching vocabulary words in permanent marker to self-adhesive poster boards. If you read them, you'd see complicated terms like "hegemony", "Patriarchy", "coded politics", and the ever-popular "capitalism." They demonstrated a complete command of language and context, and while these words…

If you think of your meeting as being on a cul-de-sac you would understand that you have three types of people driving in front of your door: those who live there, those who are visiting; and those who are looking for someplace else. You don’t get much through traffic on a cul de sac and few people actually pass by it by mistake. Especially today with GPS/webpage availability.

If you have a Healthy Meeting you probably are not on a cul-de-sac. A healthy meeting is located on a through…

Originally published on Quaker Universalist Conversations on 6/7/2015.

Young people often have a passion for acts of integrity in support of core spiritual and social values. They are willing and able to look past the cautious pragmatism of adult activists into the living heart of need, of want, of sorrow and of joy.

It’s not…

I have a history of ministers in my bloodline, but not as extensively as, say, Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a fourth-generation preacher. My great-great-great-grandfather John Jackson Camp was a Methodist minister. My great-grandfather J.C. Smallwood was a Pentecostal minister. One of my religious mentors has consistently asked me to consider seminary, to follow in their footsteps, but I do not feel myself ready to enter the ministry yet. It is an often lonely…

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Beatitudes

I read in the Atlantic Monthly this week that someone thought that this was the worst prediction of all time. My first thought was; unless it is the end of history, how would you know if it’s true?

Of course, if you look around today you would…

Friends from a neighboring local meeting are uprooting themselves to follow a leading at an age when most of us are looking at brochures for retirement venues.   Another Friend couple try to follow their hart in establishing a Christ centered Friends Meeting in a major metropolitan area but can't find a neighboring Quaker Meeting to help them because of their belief that Jesus has something special to offer to the World as much today as He did back in the day.  It is refreshing to see…