Mary Coelho has spent several decades delving into the seemingly contradictory ways of understanding how the world of science and the religious can coexist and thrive.

After experiencing a mystical experience at age 29, she felt compelled to find an explanation for the experience. In fact, she had come to know experientially of a powerfully healing and attractive dimension of life not addressed in…

On the Quaker Universalist Fellowship blog, Larry Spears writes about Marilynne Robinson's new book, The Givenness of Things (2015).

Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead: A Novel (2004), which was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer…

A difficult and powerful testimony from Alison Leigh Lilly (http://alisonleighlilly.com/about/).

Please read Alison's whole blog post at…

Originally published on Quaker Universalist Conversations

at universalistfriends.org/weblog/saint-paul-the-quaker-universalist

Quakers are right to select Paul as one of their spiritual ancestors

Careful choice of ancestors is important to our spiritual lives of all humans. Paul is a good early…

Friend Jim Wilson has a helpful comment on my post, "Seeing beyond Identities":

Mike, I wonder if your statement, "identities are figments of human conceptualization, not real boundary markers", makes sense.  It sounds to me like postmodernist sloganeering.

For example, if I am hungry I want to distinguish, that is to say,…

Republished from Quaker Universalist Conversations (10/4/2015)

In “Seeing beyond the Projections” (9/7/2015), I voiced my concern that modern Friends across the spectrum tend to perceive liberal or universalist Quakerism as representing anything but…

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…

Originally published on the Quaker Universalist Conversations blog on 8/2/2015.

The fragments of one of the world’s oldest manuscripts of the Quran has been found at the University of Birmingham (see “A Find in Britain: Quran…

As Richard Beck wrote in “Kenosis,”

I’m tired. Of myself.

Not sad. Not depressed. Not suicidal. Not dark.

Just tired.

Tired of being an ego. Having an ego.

I’m tired of filtering…

Peter M. Leschak wrote the following in a review of Kathleen Stocking’s 1991 book, Letters from the Leelanau: Essays of People and Place: “All of us are watchers, but few are observers. Missing are the village elders and seers, the astute perceivers who interpreted life and effort through nature and the primal cycles. Kathleen Stocking is one of those seers, and she’s…

Friends,

The Quaker Universalist Fellowship blog has adjusted its July-September schedule of topics in order to allow more time for contributions from readers. We’ve also added a topic for September.

Please share the information below with anyone you know

who might like to write for Quaker Universalist Fellowship.

July- August 2015 — Quaker universalism and…

Originally published on Quaker Universalist Conversations on 6/7/2015.

Young people often have a passion for acts of integrity in support of core spiritual and social values. They are willing and able to look past the cautious pragmatism of adult activists into the living heart of need, of want, of sorrow and of joy.

It’s not…

How do parents & young people experience Quakerism?

Friends,

Quaker Universalist Conversations invites both Quaker adults and young people growing up in Quaker families and meetings to share their thoughts in writing.

See our Submission Guidelines and email us at…

Friends,

Called a "rural seer" by the New York Times in 1991, Kathleen Stocking left Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula, took her powers of perception on the road, taught in the prisons and homeless shelters of California, taught in a scary private school in El Salvador, managed two tours in the Peace Corps, traveled, discovered a world increasingly without borders due to the Internet, and finally came home…

Excerpts from the Winter/Spring 2015 Harvard Divinity Bulletin

(Originally published as a post on Quaker Universalist Conversations on 3/25/2015.)

Eboo Patel is the founder and…

Blog topics for May, June & July



In May through July, we hope our readers will be led to share their personal reflections on several topics.

May 2015 — Quaker universalism and parenting

• What do we tell our children about the nature of God, the…

Get a $5.99 ebook of A Garden Grows: Quakerism in Nazi Germany, Mary Mills' translation of essay by Hans Albrecht, a driving force behind the efforts of German Quakers to assist those persecuted by the Nazi government and Clerk of the German Yearly Meeting 1927-1947.



Our review is…

There has been a universalist dimension to Quaker-Christian faith from the beginning.  It is grounded in a paradox that cannot be resolved, only lived.

—Douglas Gwyn,

"But Who Do You Say That I Am?" – Quakers and Christ Today

(Pendle Hill Pamphlet 426, 2014, p. 21)

In February on Quaker…