Walking the shelves of my local library, I was surprised to find a label on a book that said "Christian Fiction." It was just above the regular label that makes books findable in  the stacks.

Topsham Public Library puts labels on fiction that say FIC, and then below that, again in caps, the first three initials of the author's last name: JAM for a book by Marlon James that I'm reading now. Across the river, Brunswick Public Library puts  labels on fiction that say FIC, then…

It is Martin Luther King Day and I am thinking about how difficult it is to know our own worst capabilities.

I’ve been thinking about an experience in the 1980s. I was living near a Quaker day school that had an ugly, racist incident. The school community awoke one day to find a large surface on the school grounds had been painted with unquestionably racist graffiti. There were KKK-robed figures, there was an African-African head with a bullet traveling through it, there was the…

Doug Shoemaker, the Superintendent of Indiana Yearly Meeting, has been writing a series of ‘letters to George Fox’ that appear in the IYM Communicator. I find interest in these letters in considering whether I agree with them and also whether I think he construes George Fox in a way Fox would want to be understood.  In his recent, eighteenth letter, Shoemaker addresses the possibility of human’s achieving perfection, or ‘entire sanctification.’

Dear…

November 19, 2015

Why was the Bible written? The Bible itself tells us very little. I don’t recollect any verse in which Jesus says to a disciple, “Simon, will you take notes today, you know, for the record?”

When I first came to know the Bible in my teens and 20s, it never occurred to me to wonder why the Bible had been written. Of course there was a Bible;…