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Local Friends @QuakersofNE explaining how they have reached out to their communities #quakeroutreach16 pic.twitter.com/ApDzQ2140Y

— Robin Mohr (@robinmsf) April 30, 2016

My partner’s mother hails from conservative small town Texas. Now pushing seventy, I’ve heard her tell the same story on numerous occasions. It must have left quite a lasting impression, as I hear it every time I’m visiting family during the holidays. The latest retelling is always delivered with a kind of amused pity. She relates to the…

I have been reading an e-book called "Convergent Model of Renewal".

As I understand it thus far, the future of Quakerism is a kind of hybrid of Episcopalian, liberation theologian and furry cosplayer.

Mind you, this is probably the most hopeful suggestion I have heard in years...

There are many of us who are witnessing (living in) an existence wherein our conscious, conscience, meaning, purpose, and identity is established in imminent awareness itself in itself without regard to outward ideas, institutions, scriptures, persons, in political, religious, or economic contexts.  To testify to this way of existence is not in itself an act of judgementalism against an existence anchored in outward forms. It is merely sharing another way of existence.

Here is a…

                    Announcing the opening of a new blog sponsored                    by the Santa Monica Religious Society of Friends

Last Sunday, March 3, SMFM’s new blog on inequality was unveiled at the Adult Education meeting, following Fellowship. The clerk of the subcommittee of Peace and Social Action formed to study Inequality, Tim Vreeland, made the presentation to a small but appreciative audience using the house television…

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…

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). …

There are many of us today whose way of existence or awareness on earth is inherently anchored. That is, our conscious or awareness is inherent in itself and our conscience is formed or informed inherently; our identity, meaning, and purpose is in direct and unmediated awareness itself in itself. This inherent existence is sufficient in itself to sustain awareness and to sustains our identity, meaning, and purpose in all things on this earth. We experience life on earth somewhat like…

For the sake of full disclosure and complete transparency, let me state for the record my religious past. I was raised, baptized, and confirmed a United Methodist. At the age of seventeen, well into teenage rebellion, I became a heathen Unitarian Universalist. This lasted for eight years, whereupon I dramatically renounced UUism and returned again to my…

“Shield me against my selfishness and my indifference to God and to my neighbor.”

~from the Novena to Saint Benedict

Early spring at the Weston Priory, a Benedictine monastery in Vermont, the monks garden is spare. You will note the bricks in the foreground with the message to “pray”.…

Some years ago in a lecture series on the Bible given at Pendle Hill, a speaker urged Friends to take back the Bible from the fundamentalists.With more than a decade having passed since that time, Quakers, for the most part, continue to forfeit our responsibility to interpret Scriptures in our particular way, through waiting for guidance from the same Spirit that brought them forth. For too long we have discounted the Scriptures’ use as a reality…

I will be playing the hireling minister at our local United Church this morning. So for those who object to prepared sermons I apologize now. I'm posting the text in part because I think it speaks to the character of our religious experiences somewhat and so may be of interest to some.

Now our Bibles are whole libraries of stories stretching across thousands of years of storytelling and seasoned liberally with poems, and laws, regulations and promises. But in case you…