The following is the text of a message delivered during worship by ESR student Travis Etling on September 22, 2015. 

 It is a Quaker practice, among many Friends, to avoid oath taking based on the New Testament book of Matthew, Chapter Five, verses 34 through 37. Friends have struggled well into the last century to get states to recognize our conduct of the marriage rite in Meetings that do not hold with employing ministers.  The same seems to be the case for embracing of same gender couples in this century. State office…

What terrifies people most about Christianity?  Pope Francis is just winding up his tour of the US and from a Quaker standpoint, his call to US Congress to withdraw from the Arms Bazaar (its main activity) and to focus on helping the people (what a concept!) seems entirely benign.  My mom is clucking happily about it, and she's a world famous nuclear abolitionist.  So what's the problem?

Catholicism is still smarting from the Galileo episode when the church was caught squarely on the…

I'm not out in this post to air any personal grievances. A Friend told me, in more profane terms, that there are a certain amount of cares one can give about any contentious subject. There comes a time in every person's life where change is necessary, even changing houses of worship. I'm keeping this post simple and short for now, but may expand its focus as…

As a matter of statistical likelihood, if you just get the sound track of the discussion, and it boils down to "too many people" being the root problem, chances are these are "Anglos" in the sense of "English speakers".



Parsing the world's problems that way inherits specifically from the East India Company and Thomas Malthus in particular.  Malthus pointed out that the amount of arable land is finite and if biological forms are allowed to keep doubling, they always overwhelm the…

I AM not of the world of human being enchanted by simulation and similitude. In the Name of God, I AM. I AM Presence itself and Presence is me. Presence is within me and all around me shattering the outward shadowy layers of abstract and artificial simulations and similitudes overlaying human being. In the Name itself , the foggy spell of outward secular and religious forms, practices, and governments, fashioned and called forth in the cauldron of the abstract…

Where does this word "liberal" come from and what does it mean?  I'll dare a naive etymology to start:  "liber" is from "liberty" but I also see "book". 

Now checking Google...  Yes "tree bark" is a part of it, as if "liber" were some kind of papyrus.  The liberty one achieves by reading. 

These connect:  liberal arts; open minded;  catholic.

In the software world we sometimes pretend we have only the word "Free" which comes encumbered with two meanings: 

• at…

I am abiding in the Light and I am abiding the Light in me. I am the Name. To speak it is to abide in the essence of that which I AM. This gift of being in the Name is literally Being that is ever present. What a blessing to be in the Name ... I AM. I AM born again into the world every moment. This gospel is literally true and I AM come to living the eternal story every day and every moment.  

This Life in the Name is Meeting, Community, Practice, Love, and there is no thing before…

What is a Quaker Meeting?

A Quaker Meeting is about offering the general public opportunities for community service in the context of a role-based institution designed around Quaker values.  These roles are unpaid in most cases, but not unimportant and may be regarded as in-kind donations of time-energy by those filling them.



Quaker values include a lack of hierarchy, which does not mean anarchy.  A Meeting is a set of structured concurrent processes…

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…

Note: I originally posted this as a comment to Mike Shell’s stimulating blog, “Seeing Beyond the Projections” (which I recommend you also read).  I offer it here as a separate blog to invite comments just on it.

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It is unfortunate that many of our Quaker meetings/churches have brought into the meetinghouse the divisiveness that is so prevalent in the world at large. …

Originally published 9/7/2015 on Quaker Universalist Conversations.

Please visit the original post to read an interesting series of Comments.

Some recent conversations with Friends revealed that they considered Quaker Universalism to…

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…

A Witness from Heaven



I am a new being by the power of the inward Light re-placing how I am conscious and the direction from which my conscience is informed. My identity and self-conscious rests completely in the Light itself. It has taken years, yet the Light has open my being to the clarity of life independent of the outward religious, political, governmental, institutional, theological, and ideological, abstractions that once overlaid my conscious and conscience. I now live…

Each of us can know the power of the Inshining right down to the deepest depths of our conscious and conscience and with this Inshining, we can experience the transformation of our perception so that the inward Light pushes out into the world and we see in a different light, percieving the Kingdom all around us and within us. We do not have to take anyone's word for it or read about it in a book. We can live in the outshining percieving the power of the Spirit in all things. There is no…

Some Quakers confuse their brand of Quakerism with Puritanism, contemporary with Quakerism, and which may have leached in and diluted the admixture.  A robust, flavorful Quakerism without the taint of adulteration, includes a taste for beer.  Many Quakers have been…

Let’s be friends. Let’s play a game, or play make-believe, or play around just to see what happens. Let’s play the Massively Multiplayer Offline Game called The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Each of us gets two characters – InnerFriend and OuterFriend – and the goal is to keep them together, as closely as we can, while we move them through The Valley toward The Eternal Mystery.

Now, about The Eternal Mystery. No other player can tell you where to find it. Only the Mystery can reveal…