Being a Peculiar People
By Rachel Stacy … Over the last two weeks I have worked as a steward for the World Council of Churches (WCC), International Ecumenical Peace Convocation (IEPC). With over 300 member faith communities, the
By Rachel Stacy … Over the last two weeks I have worked as a steward for the World Council of Churches (WCC), International Ecumenical Peace Convocation (IEPC). With over 300 member faith communities, the
Jenny Doughty cites a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins in response to Tony Lowe’s question, “Were Early Friends Universalists?“ … “Fox found in all of the churches of his day a tendency to rely on the wisdom of the leadership, their traditions…
By Tony Lowe, Pastoral Minister, Fancy Gap Meeting … There seems to be a great deal of discussion taking place of late about whether or not early Quakers were universalists. Many modern Friends struggle with or even reject what they perceive to be the exclusive…
By Anthony Manousos … Yesterday, when I was asked to speak at a Methodist Women’s Conference here in LA, I told the women that I believed war must and can be abolished, just like slavery, and that if women united, they could abolish war. Do you agree? If so, how can we go…
Responding to the question, “Is there a Truth that is universal and absolute?” Stephen Davison writes: … Doesn’t it come down to how we define “absolute”? My Webster’s 7th Collegiate includes “perfect, unrestricted…
James Riemermann responds to Stephen Angell’s question: “Can we attain absolute Truth as Friends?” … I have a feeling–I could be wrong about this–that by “truth” you mean something other than my fairly mundane, conventional…
Stephen Angell, professor of religion at Earlham College, writes about the belief among early Friends that one could attain “absolute Truth” through the Inward Light of Christ, and how challenging this idea is for us today: This has been a fascinating and…
Adria Gulizia responds to by James Riemermann’s post: … I did not intend to caricature universalism, but to speak to a particular form of universalism that I have seen in Friends meetings and that, frankly, doesn’t make much sense. The fact of the matter is…
by James Riemermann … I would like to ask just who it is that sees universalism as the idea that all religions are equally valid. There may be universalists here and there who actually subscribe to this, but overwhelmingly I hear this view of universalism trotted out not by…
by Adria Gulizia … Is it possible for a Christian to be a Universalist? This question made me think about the common assumption that universalism is a monolith, or at least that all forms of universalism are somehow equivalent. However, while I believe that the historical…