Benjamin Franklin is often held up as a hero of American colonial era, and often conflated with Quakers because of his presence in largely-Quaker Philadelphia. The Franklin Institute, for example, includes the question, “Was Benjamin Franklin a Quaker?” among its …

I delivered the following message at Richmond First Friends on May 28, 2017. ​This post originally appeared on the Quaker Libertarians blog.

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The following is an adaptation of a message delivered during worship at Richmond First Friends on October 23, 2016.

John 15: 9-17

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As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have…

Sarah is Assistant Professor of History at San Francisco State University and author of Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2015). …

Recently in reading through Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State, I came across an interesting concept with possible relevance for religious practice. In critiquing the economic thought of some others, he explains that…

I am in a reading group that recently finished up a book on the “dones” by Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope - Church Refugees: Sociologists reveal why people are DONE with church but not their faith. The authors surveyed people from across the U.S. that have left the church and found some striking commonalities in their responses. One of those key areas has…

Mike King’s 2014 book Quakernomics: An Ethical Capitalism should interest anyone who wants to learn more about the history of 19th century British Quakers in business. Beyond that, the claim that the book provides “an…

Some thoughts on feminism, Quakerism, and voluntaryism

In the 2004 book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, bell hooks seeks to build a bridge between men and women in the effort to undermine the destructive effects of…

Pianist Byron Janis recently shared his thoughts on what makes "Chopin Chopin" in a column for the Wall Street Journal. As he explains:

No word is more important in describing the…

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece by Stuart Isacoff on Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations."   

In it,…

Friends United Meeting recently announced that it will soon be publishing a 2nd Edition of Douglas Gwyn's Apocalypse of the…

The Doctrine of Discovery is a legal principle that still informs American jurisprudence. In the 1828 Supreme Court case Johnson v. M'Intosh, "Chief Justice John Marshall justified the way in which colonial powers laid claim to lands belonging to…

It is my hope that most Americans will one day agree on the following three items:

The need to scale back

  - the size and scope of our military intervention

  - the war on drugs and the resultant mass incarceration 

  - domestic and international…

Quakers have a long history of advocating for more humane prison conditions, in part stemming from their own experience of wrongful imprisonment. Are Friends ready to take the next step and call for the complete abolition of prisons? 

Learn more…

From a message delivered on February 13, 2014, in ESR worship:

Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.

Do you remember that line? It’s from The Smashing Pumpkins song, “Bullet with…

In part as a response to comments on a recent QuakerQuaker post about whether Friends should engage the political system at all, this post is meant to stimulate further discussion by citing examples from the history of early Friends that…

FCNL is at it again in their latest video. On the one hand, they rightly question maintaining ridiculously high military spending and the Pentagon's efforts to hold on to higher budgets in times of relative peace. On the other hand, however, they employ an outmoded "guns v. butter" approach to the federal budget, suggesting that any reduction in military spending should necessarily lead to a spending spree for any number of other priorities - this is what they call "The Peace…

The inaugural blog post at the newly-launched Quaker Libertarians site recently went live:

National Quaker organizations have the unfortunate tendency to address war spending from the perspective of budget realignment or reallocation. This approach puts forth the false notion that national governments sit atop vast reserves of wealth that should…