Ever since I was diagnosed with a heart condition, I have rarely gone a month without attending to the needed remedy (for a benign condition). I try to get weekly outdoor exercise and shop for omega-3 foods. I also look to Friends to be just that—an accepting…
A Quaker Prayer Life , by David Johnson (Inner Light Books, 2013; see excerpts). Johnson has a long commitment to nonviolence and opposing war and the arms trade, and has worked with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. He delivered the 2005 Backhouse…
In “Renewing Our Native Religion,” the most recent post on Experimental Theology, his beautiful blog, Richard Beck shares the following quotation from Wendell Berry: [T]here are an enormous number of people—and I am one of them—whose native religion, for…
I am beginning to suspect that we Quakers have a disturbing tendency to objectify, through our pity or our zeal, those we want to feel ourselves to be “helping.” I think I’ve seen us do it to our youth; I think I’ve seen us do it around race; I think…
What is required is to stay low to the Truth, not to hide it or apologize for it…. Do not share one syllable more of your Scriptures than the “Spirit that gave them forth” is speaking in you—but equally, do not share one syllable less. When speaking from…
I guess you could say that I am in Quaker kindergarten. As a new follower of Quakers and universalism, a roadmap would be helpful to build my understanding of these institutions. The QUF weblog has spawned many new ideas and raised questions for me…
Recently Katie Kent added a comment to the discussion following last July’s Intellect post. She wrote: I have just come to realize why i define myself as a quaker: it is a spiritual discipline and practice, rather than a set of beliefs. … To me, “Rising…
I had an opening early this morning, the sort of opening which I experience as remembering something I already knew. Intellect brings human beings to the doorway of awareness and leaves them there. I suppose my brain was riffing on another saying I don’t remember clearly…
by Rachel Stacy … Balancing several writing projects while touring another country is proving challenging but in these liminal spaces I feel incredibly aware of the world around me and my own processing of all these experiences. Yesterday in effort to get something out for this…
By Anthony Manousos … Rachel’s blog on fasting and Lent has prompted some responses from readers that I would like to address. First, a Muslim reader noted that Lent and Ramadan seem very similar. While both involve fasting, there are also profound differences between…