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…

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…

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…

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…

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…