World, structures, power, past, and present: thematic reflections on BYM 2023

Britain Yearly Meeting this year had some surprises for me. I would often write myself some notes at this stage anyway, part journal about my experience and part memory-jogger for the future, and this year I am encouraged to share them by a piece of ministry we heard about the importance of collective memory. I don’t intend this as anything other than a personal record of some thoughts, though, so please refer to the epistle and minutes and if you were there, add your own thoughts.

I went to most of the main sessions. I was ill over the weekend before and didn’t make it to many of the preparation sessions, but I read or watched some of the material. During the bank holiday weekend, I made it to most of the main Yearly Meeting sessions; I missed one on Sunday morning because I was with the Young People’s Programme instead, and I missed the last one on Monday afternoon because I needed to travel home. I took a few notes during the sessions, but I am mostly relying on my memory for what follows – and of course, I may have heard or interpreted the ministry differently to others. And I’m not including the Swarthmore lecture here although there are important connections with these themes.

There are several different themes bound up together in what we considered, so I’m going to start by listing some of the things I think are key before trying to explore them. Themes include: our attitude to the world around us and to the diversity within our membership; our ambivalent relationship to power both external and our own; and a struggle with time, as we look back to the past (selectively), face the future with both fear and courage, try to be patient and spacious in our present considerations, and also work under immense time pressure.

How do we assess the world around us? In talking about truth and integrity, we often have a negative assessment of the government and politicians. That’s based on plenty of good evidence: politicians lying, offering financial benefits to their friends, looking after the rich and letting people who are already suffering suffer more. But I think a generalised suspicion of the state carries over from this into areas where actually we agree with what is being done: the Charity Commission, for example, seems to become an opponent who ‘imposes’ things on us, although their purpose is “To ensure charity can thrive and inspire trust so that people can improve lives and strengthen society” and frankly, that seems like a good idea. As a religious charity, I’m pretty sure Quakers do want to thrive, be trusted and trustworthy, improve lives, and strengthen society in our own ways. One way to do some of that, especially to be trusted and trustworthy, is to work with the Charity Commission and OSCR, their Scottish counterpart, to make sure that all our charities are correctly registered, keeping good accounts, following best practice in data protection and safeguarding, etc. 

This ambivalent feeling was also visible in some of the attitudes expressed to internal structures and situations. Trustee bodies, especially to the extent that they are seen as secular, connected to the state, and externally imposed rather than integral to our community, are respected and thanked for the work they do, but also regarded with suspicion. It’s not clear to me that any of those perceptions are as straightforward as they might seem: following the law might be secular in some sense, but when the purpose of it is to care for one’s neighbour it seems to be fully in line with our ethical and religious commitments, and while reporting to the state is a form of connection, it doesn’t mean the state is telling us what to do with our resources. The Charity Commission needs to be happy with our ways of managing resources and being legally accountable, but Quaker meetings for worship for business, including us as the Yearly Meeting in session, have chosen how to arrange things. 

A related problem is that sometimes when trustees do what we have asked them to do they are seen as power grabbing, because the official delegation of responsibility hasn’t been accompanied by an acceptance that decisions will in fact be made by the body which is now responsible for them. This anxiety about power in ‘their’ hands goes along with an awkward relationship to the power which is in our hands – as the Yearly Meeting in session, we are the ones with the power to make many changes. We have, in fact, made many changes over the years: to lay down quarterly meetings, to have a new book of discipline, to have trustees in the first place… we take to some of these changes more easily than others. We need to remember when it was us (even a completely different set of people, but the same body) who set things up in the first place – we heard about one case where Meeting for Sufferings had new members who reopened old decisions, and that can happen to Yearly Meeting as well.

I was struck by the many stories we tell about how we got here. During Yearly Meeting we heard repeated versions of the story of the creation of a small separate trustee body, all from slightly different perspectives. One way to think about this is to consider how the stories we tell about the past reflect different concerns about the future. One might, for example, cast a past time as an ideal time when the Yearly Meeting was powerful and engaged, and contrast that with problems today. Another version highlights things which were difficult in the past, both explaining why they were changed to the present arrangement and fearing similar difficulties in possible future arrangements. Yet another focusses on numbers and the falling line you see if you create a graph of our membership over the past few decades. That creates a feeling that surely we should do something, but interpreting a graph and discerning what to do are not always straightforward. Our numbers might change because of social trends well outside our control – like a general reluctance to become a member of anything. Standing up for the marginalised in society or the moral right in a world which doesn’t value that much might even lower our numbers as people find it difficult to be associated with us, and despite that it can still be what we are led to do. 

Something similar comes up in conversations about our diversity. There are lots of things to acknowledge here. As a community, Quakers are already diverse in some ways, including some ways which we might not always see. We often talk about theology as a form of diversity. We don’t so often talk about class, but do have members from many class backgrounds. It’s also the case that demographically, we don’t match the communities which surround us – we have non-white members, but we are whiter than British society as a whole; we haven’t all got university degrees but we do have a higher proportion of university educated people than British society as a whole. There’s obviously something to work on here, but Friends can be reluctant to make concrete changes. Will we do that work, or will Helen Minnis’s Swarthmore lecture from last year go the same way as the Quaker Women’s Group lecture of 1986, which as Hazel Shellens says, “made a huge impact at the time of its delivery, but… did not lead to any major changes”?

This post is already more than long enough. It’s difficult to unpick all these themes and ideas – a whole bank holiday weekend is in some ways a long time to spend in the AGM of a charity, and in other ways not nearly long enough to do justice to all the complexities which arise. We can prepare and explain at length and still have trouble getting everyone talking about the same question with adequate background information when the time comes to discern our next steps.

I hope these thematic reflections on Yearly Meeting will be helpful in continuing our thinking. Do they speak to you? Of the many things which were happening during the Yearly Meeting, what would you add? Is there somewhere here that I’m mistaken? Is there an area of this you feel led to explore in more detail?

A year of surprise books

For my first wedding anniversary, my friend Marion who has known me since secondary school gave me a year of blind dates with books – twelve books wrapped in brown paper and labelled by month, so that each month I got a surprise book. It’s now almost my second wedding anniversary, the books have run out, and I thought I’d write a bit about this experience. I see some Pinterest/TikTok/etc posts about the idea from the giver’s point of view – choosing books, wrapping them up, and so on – but not so much about what it’s like for a recipient. 

The first thing I want to note is that how well this works for the recipient is going to vary a lot depending on their reading habits in general. I read ten to fifteen books in an average month, and already belong to a circulating library system (a group of us vote on books, which are then circulated so each member of the group has each book for a month), so adding one extra book to my reading for the month wasn’t a big stretch and I did keep up with them. If I only had time to read one book a month, this present might have lasted me a very long time! That said, there was still one book I didn’t read cover to cover.

At the beginning – a clear plastic box with twelve parcels in it, each wrapped in brown paper and labelled with a month. On the top I have left the instructions which were taped to the wrapping paper. They start, “What do you get a bookworm that seems to have everything? Get her 12 ‘Blind Dates with a Book’

Another is that as the recipient, there are some choices to make about how to interact. For example, I chose to unwrap the books on the first day of each month, but I didn’t necessarily read the book immediately – it came as a surprise to some extent, but I would unwrap it and put it on my to-be-read shelf with others rather than unwrapping and going straight into it. That decision lessened the blind-date effect to some extent – when I sat down to read, I knew what the book was, and sometimes had left it sitting there for two or three weeks – but increased the chances that I would actually read it, by matching the genre etc. to the time and place of reading. (For example, I could choose not to read a thriller at bedtime.) I think that’s a lot about personality and reading style. My method worked well for me, but it may not be exactly how the present was intended to work.

In some but not all of the books, Marion had included a note about why she chose it, whether she’d read it or not, etc. If you’re wrapping something up, I’d say this is well worth the effort, because it dramatically increased my feeling of connection to the books and desire to read them. Some of the ones which didn’t have notes and which were outside my usual genres made me wonder why I was reading them, and a note might have helped! 

The final pile of twelve unwrapped books, stacked on my shelves (not in order).

In the end, I read eleven of the twelve books in full. The other one is a volume of poetry, which I dipped into and appreciated, but didn’t feel like reading cover to cover. It was good to be encouraged to try things I wouldn’t usually pick up – including at least one famous author everyone likes but I normally avoid. I made a special shelf tag for them on Goodreads, so I can easily go back and see the whole collection (although at the moment I also have them in a physical pile, that will probably be broken up next time I need to sell/donate/pass on books to make more shelf space). If you’re thinking of doing something similar, as long as your intended recipient is a regular reader, I say go for it. If you’re less confident about choosing, a similar gift where the recipient has more choice is the Persephone Books subscription – someone else sent that as a wedding gift the previous year, and I thoroughly enjoyed that too!

Free book: I Heart SapphFic Favorite Scenes from Favorite Authors Anthology

Download this free anthology and sample the scenes that make these authors the proudest. What a fantastic way to find your next sapphic read!

With almost two hundred extracts from a wide range of sapphic genres, this anthology will help you explore the whole world of sapphic stories. It includes several historical romances – my prehistoric book, Between Boat & Shore, is one of them – and fantasy, sci-fi, and all sorts of other genres as well. You can download it in several different ebook formats here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/ck3pqiiavx

Being an Archery Wife

When we got married in 2021, Piangfan Angela wasn’t into any sports – between her health, and needing to move cities several times, and the pandemic, there hadn’t been much chance. But later that year she set out to find a new sport. It would never had occurred to me because sports means nothing to me except pain, humiliation, and oppressive power structures, but Angela had positive experiences in the past and argued convincely that it would be a good opportunity to meet new people, take structured breaks from sitting at the computer all day, and generally improve her physical and mental health. I agreed that this was a commonly held theory, and that as long as I wasn’t going to be made to do anything, she could go and try out some sports.

Within a couple of weeks, the Archery Adventure had begun. It shows no signs of stopping. 

I had some idea about archery. I had even tried, perhaps two or three times, at the beginner’s taster session level often offered at scout and guide events. It didn’t particularly interest me, but I knew some of the basics. What I didn’t know was how much more there was to learn.

Some aspects of archery I have mastered. I can make a joke using the names of at least five different archery shops from around the world. I can comment on topics such as form, groupings, and where to find lost arrows fluently enough to at least make it sound convincing in a ChatGPT bullshit kind of way, and sometimes even look in the right place for the arrow. I am familiar with several of the common forms of archery Facebook group post which my wife finds most annoying (follow these top tips to reduce ranting: don’t ask a question on the internet unless you want people on the internet to answer it; don’t try and shoot at home unless you’re really sure you’ve made it safe; don’t be racist, classist, or sexist; join a club and take a beginner’s course instead of hoping Facebook will teach you a physical skill). 

Other aspects I have learned to avoid. Although my girl guide knot typing skills cover the basics needed for creating a nocking point, working with nylon and fire has distinct risks and I prefer to avoid it. After the Night The Fletching Jig Fell Apart, I made a firm commitment to never touch one again and my wife now sometimes fletches her own arrows or pays/cajoles/bullies someone else to it. I am also trying to always agree with her coach.

I also haven’t worked out how to answer the inevitable question. When I’m accompanying her to an archery club, or a shop, or a competition, and just sitting around, holding the bags and nodding supportively, people ask – it even seems reasonable on the face of it – “Do you shoot?” “Are you an archer too?” “Would you like a go?” I do not, and am not, and never will. But it seems rude to say to someone’s face that I find their sport or hobby bizzare and its attractions inexplicable, so I have to go for the vague. I’ve tried “It’s not my scene” and “it doesn’t appeal to me” but that doesn’t always seem to put them off from trying to encourage me to have a go. “I’m morally opposed to competitions” seems a bit strong, although it has an element of truth. “I have lots of other things to do” is true, but so do lots of people who find time for archery anyway. Perhaps “nothing else will ever be as interesting as a good book” would give the right impression?

Anyway, enough about me. If you’d like the follow the Archery Adventure, you can get all the latest news about my wife’s competitions and medals and other achievements on her archery Instagram. 

Reading in February

I’m not sure I intend this blog to focus on my reading – but I do intend to write a post every month, and at the moment writing about what I’ve been reading seems both moderately interesting and reasonably safe, in that a lot of other things affecting my life at the moment aren’t really mine to talk about. (One of them, the announcement about the Woodbrooke Centre, was made public after I wrote the first draft of this post. I also managed to finish writing it just in time for World Book Day.)

Last month I wrote about my challenge for the year, and in February I did manage to read books in all six categories. For a change, though, I’m going to write about them by genre rather than in those categories specifically.

I read several fantasy books this month. It reminded me that at one time I was mainly a fantasy reader, with a little bit of sci-fi thrown in, and although I now read very widely I still enjoy a good fantasy story. Four in this genre were:

1. Aiden Thomas The Sunbearer Trials, which has teenage characters in a deadly competition – but many of them also have superpowers in a Mexican-inspired fantasy world setting. I wasn’t a Hunger Games fan and the competition element didn’t really appeal to me, but I enjoyed the character development and world building. 
2.  Samantha Shannon The Priory of the Orange Tree, which has a blurb on the back describing it as a feminist Lord of the Rings. I was doubtful but actually that’s not a terrible description – it does have a focus on women, including women who fall in love with each other, who ride dragons and wield magic swords and generally do the adventure part of a swords and sorcery story as well as the washing up.
3.  Ann Leckie The Raven Tower, a delightfully weird book, the plot of which I can hardly describe without giving away spoilers. I will say that if you’re looking for books which explore animism through a fantasy lens, and you’ve already read Pratchett’s Small Gods, this might be of interest.
4.  Ahmed Saadawi Frankenstein in Baghdad (trans. Jonathan Wright), which could also be filed under horror or satire – but with a strong magical realism element which also qualifies it, in my opinion, for this category. A compelling reflection on the gruesome results of war and the ethical imperatives it creates, especially those which trap people in a cycle of violence. 

Other reading was more scattered. I am almost at the end of a year of blind dates with books – for my wedding anniversary in April last year, my friend Marion gave me twelve books wrapped in plain paper and labelled one per month. I still have one to open for March. February’s book was Eagle Day by Robert Muchamore; set in the second world war and I think aimed at teenage boys, it was an interesting read for me. It skirts the edge of exploring moral complexity but generally comes down on the side of a simple British = good German = bad narrative which sometimes frustrates me. It provides footnotes to explain technical terms, like what a U-Boat is, which would be taken for granted in a book aimed at an older audience. The central characters are all aged eleven to fifteen, and the notice on the back, “Not suitable for younger readers” seems to be as much about making it okay for teenagers to read as actually warning off under-tens!

I read three other novels this month. One was also set during the second world war, although J. E. Leak’s In the Shadow of the Past is very different to Eagle Day – although they both feature spies, In the Shadow of the Past is a historical romance with adventure elements, rather than an adventure story, and the main characters are two women who are attracted to each other and must decide how to act on that or not. I enjoyed the angst as the multiple layers of overlapping difficulty developed in the plot, and there’s a twist at the end which promises more fun to come in the next book in the series.

Radiant Fugitives by Nawaaz Ahmed also features a woman who loves woman, although she also has a fairly long relationship with a man and refuses to label her sexuality. The focus on the story is on intergenerational developments, especially parent-child relationships, with all the complexities created by international movement, changing approaches to religion, multiple languages, and different attitudes to sexuality. For me the exploration of Islam in America and the main character’s changing relationship to the queer community were especially interesting.

The final novel, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat, was a more challenging read, with several different time periods interwoven and some emotionally difficult content as Kenyan characters are treated brutally – or just weirdly – by the British. There is also a good deal of moral complexity, addressing similar issues to Frankenstein in Baghdad about ethically sound responses in a time of war, although by a very different and much more realist route which does not allow the reader any ironic distance. 

Besides these, I read five nonfiction books. My review of Finding Right Relations: Quakers, Native Americans, and Settler Colonialism will appear in the summer issue of Quaker Studies, so I won’t go into detail here – but if you are interested in any of three items listed in the subtitle it’s probably worth a read, and if you’re interested in two or more I would definitely recommend it as an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about those interactions. On a different but also brief note, William King Baker’s early twentieth century dramatisation of the lives of George and Margaret Fox doesn’t really need discussing – it was interesting to read as an example of how people have tried to make history accessible, but it doesn’t succeed in that aim for modern audiences. Similarly, Neolithic Houses in North-West Europe and Beyond was a useful read as part of my ongoing research on Neolithic lives in Britain, but it’s both academic and probably somewhat dated (a lot of excavation has happened since it was published in 1996) so I won’t be recommending it as such.

Seldon Smith’s Pendle Hill Pamphlet An Atheist’s Guide to Quaker Process, however, is well worth discussing and already sparked some interesting conversations on Facebook. Smith’s articulation of a nontheist approach to Quaker decision making will not appeal to everyone – for example, the theism it does not have is noticeably Christian in some ways, and some of the details of the discipline are not shared by all Yearly Meetings – but is a useful attempt at answering a very frequently asked question about nontheist participation in Quaker communities. Smith himself is a nontheist and gives a clear account of his understanding, based on extensive experience of Quaker decision-making, which is a very valuable perspective to hear. I consider this a considerable step forward on what I had before, which was some philosophically coherent guesses about possible answers based on things nontheist Quakers had said in other contexts, and hope that it will prompt further work on explaining Quaker processes in multiple different ways.

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is a lively and accessible exploration of the point at which all time management approaches will fail – the fact that we have limited time alive and cannot possibly do everything. It was good to see written down some things I’ve long felt, including that it’s okay to choose some areas of life to be bad at (he suggests lawn care as an example; I long ago selected mental arithmetic), and that it’s better to focus on experiencing the moment than cramming in every activity possible.

What have you been reading recently, Friends? Do you use Goodreads or another site to help you keep track?

Reading Diversely and Other Challenges

It’s been hard to find time and focus to write a blog post recently – since we got back from our amazing three-week holiday in Thailand, I’ve been busy. Busy with my ordinary work at Woodbrooke, which remains fun and interesting: examining a PhD thesis, starting an online course on discernment, planning future courses, meeting new colleagues. Busy with other work, like offering private tuition for A-level Religious Studies students. Busy with voluntary work, including being co-editor of Quaker Studies and serving on Britain Yearly Meeting’s Book of Discipline Revision Committee. Busy with family and friends – a family member is seriously ill, friends have been struggling, lots which I can’t discuss in public. And of course busy with the everyday of life: laundry, washing up, proofreading bits of my wife’s PhD work, finding time to do my own writing (especially when I have academic book chapters and conference papers with due dates looming…).

But among all that, I always read a fair amount, and at the beginning of January I thought I’d have a new year’s resolution to try and balance my reading in any given month. Challenges for reading a more diverse range of books come in lots of forms. The one I designed for myself gives me six categories of books to focus on – I aim to read at least one in each category in each month. Some might count for more than one category. I normally read between twelve and fifteen books a month, so six in categories leaves me space for other things as well. My six categories for 2023 are:

• a book by an author who is LGBTQI+
• a book by an author of colour
• a book by an author who lives somewhere other than the UK or the USA
• a sapphic romance book
• a book which contributes to my ‘uses of Quaker history’ research project
• a book of academic philosophy, theology, or study of religion

Some of these are the sort of diverse reading challenges I see on TikTok – at the moment, for example, Black History Month in the USA is coming up and lots of people are recommending authors of colour. Others are much more personal – other people might also be researching Quaker history but only I get to decide what contributes to my project! I’m pleased to say that in January I managed to read in all of these categories, and in this post I’d like to share a few comments on the things I’ve read.

For the first two categories, I got two books which could fit into both. I was given Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath as a Christmas present, and it made an excellent start on this: it’s a fun story about a college-age Puetro Rican lesbian from New York who sets out to find herself and ends up learning a lot about coming out and family responses to it, feminism (including the gifts and failings of white feminism), and what it means to love in many different ways. Gabby Rivera, like her main character, is a lesbian with Puetro Rican heritage, and also the author of a Marvel comic book series about America Chavez.

From my local library, I borrowed Akwaeke Emezi’s novel The Death of Vivek Oji. This is very different in tone – it starts with a death, rather than a coming out – but addresses many overlapping issues, especially about how older generations in families come to terms with the identities of their younger members. Emezi is a nonbinary author who handles complex gender and sexuality issues with skill. I don’t want to say too much about the plot because it would easily be spoiled, but I will say that it finished in a much more hopeful place than I anticipated at the beginning. I also enjoyed the deft characterisation and judicious use of Nigerian languages and dialect.

In fact, I did well in these categories and had a couple of other books this month which would have qualified. Bolu Babalola’s Honey & Spice is an excellent straight romance by a British Nigerian author – it’s funny and clever and uses romance tropes brilliantly, and left me wanting to spend more time with the characters (I would absolutely read a sequel!). And Sandi Toksvig’s memoir-cum-historical ramble, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus talks about all sorts of aspects of her life, including coming out as a lesbian at a time when that was much less common in public life than now, and her quest for greater gender equality in everything from politics to street names.

But all of those authors, diverse as they are in some ways, are currently working in either the UK or the USA, and the point of my next challenge is to move beyond that. A book which fitted and had been sitting on my to-read shelf since I picked it up in a charity shop a while ago was Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing, set in the Republic of Ireland, written by an author who is based there, and among other things exploring the politics of Ireland and how political views on topics like sex before marriage have changed over time. It’s a quiet, thoughtful read, which explores situations rather than presenting an exciting plot or stating character’s views, but very effectively prompts the reader to reflect on the ethics of what’s happening.

The first three challenges are about reading a wide range of different authors. The next three are about content, and in particular reading to feed my different areas of work. The aim of reading a sapphic romance book every month is to try and expand my awareness of this specific niche market, a market into which I’m trying to sell my novel Between Boat & Shore (and the sequel to it, on which I’m currently working). For this category this month I chose, and borrowed from the local library, Lily Lindon’s romcom Double Booked. It turned out that the emphasis was more on the comedy than the romance so this might be a slight cheat, but I’m happy to include it here for two reasons – one, from the marketing I’d guessed it would follow more romance genre conventions than it actually did, which is an important lesson about marketing, and two, the main character is bi rather than lesbian and it’s good to establish that bi women are included in my category of sapphic characters. Also, putting the emphasis on the comedy really worked and it was a very good, sometimes laugh out loud, read.

Understanding Quaker history and how it has been used is a huge project, and I finished two books this month which fit into different parts of this work. One was H. Larry Ingle’s biography of George Fox, First Among Friends, which I started last year and needed to finish. The other was Ann Bell’s historical novel, The Sister of Mary Dyer, which is an interesting example of how fiction can be used to make history more accessible; in this case, Bell imagines that Dyer had a sister who was less committed to the Quaker cause and is able to raise questions about the situation which the reader might have. 

Finally, Mathew Guest’s sociology of religion book Neoliberal Religion was my academic read for the month. He looks at a variety of ways in which neoliberal economic ideas (including about the importance of markets, a focus on the individual, and the ‘post-truth’ era) have affected religious groups. He makes a convincing case for the impact of these ideas, and I found his nuancing of secularisation through this lens particularly useful. He also ends with a call for more work on the ethics of the sociology of religion, which seems right to me.

Now it’s the first of February and I need to make sure I have books in all six categories for this month! Feel free to comment with recommendations in any category (or none – I read other things as well). 

American Adventure

I was recently in the USA for ten days. I visited Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and went to the American Academy of Religion conference in Denver, Colorado (with my travel expenses shared between Guilford and Woodbrooke). I don’t usually use this blog for travel reports but it’s a traditional thing to do and on this occasion I thought I’d share some of my observations – many of them about Quaker stuff or religion, but also a few on the weather and public transport!

Guilford College – the place I’d heard of without realising it

I knew some things about Guilford before I went, of course. I’ve been collaborating with Wess Daniels, who is a staff member there, for several years, and I knew a few things about their Quaker Leadership Programme. I hadn’t known much about the history of the area, though – for example, I hadn’t realised it had such a long Quaker history. I knew there were plenty of Quakers there, and I had heard a little bit about the connections with the Underground Railroad. But until I talked to the archivist, who mentioned the World Gathering and the World Gathering of Young Friends, I hadn’t made the connection with the 1985 epistle from Young Friends which is included in Quaker faith & practice, which I have often heard and quoted in relation to the diversity of Quaker religious language. 

Guilford’s campus in the sunshine, showing a little bit of how the buildings are set among grass and trees.

As the Judith Weller Harvey Visiting Scholar for the week, I was invited to give a public keynote lecture, and I got to have meetings with several groups of students and some of the staff. I chatted with some students who are researching contextual theology. I spoke to the Quaker Leadership Scholars Programme about how Quakers talk about God and heard some of their reflections on their own uses of religious language. In the UK, opportunities to study Quakerism during an undergraduate course are very limited (at the moment I’m doing a couple of weeks on a module about Lived Religions in Birmingham, and perhaps a few other people mention Quakers from time to time – but I don’t think there’s a sustained programme anywhere), so it was good to meet Guilford’s students and understand a bit about their experience.

Giving my talk – I’m standing at a lectern and gesturing about… something to do with religious language. Photo credit to Wess Daniels.

The Quaker World book launch

It took several years, with Wess and I working through the pandemic, but The Quaker World was published this November. We also held an online launch, but we took the chance to do a small in-person event for those who could attend, with three contributors who are based in Guilford.

Myself, Abigail Lawrence, Wess Daniels (holding a copy of The Quaker World), Lloyd Lee Wilson, and Michael Dutch – just some of the many contributors to the book.

This is mainly a book about Quakers for an academic audience – researchers, students, and others who want to understand the complex family of Quaker traditions – rather than a book for Quakers, although of course there’s an overlap between those groups and some Quakers will be interested in reading it. As well as many thanks to Wess and all our amazing contributors, I’d like to thank the staff at Routledge for providing many professional services to The Quaker World, including organising anonymous peer review of the book proposal, the cover design, multiple rounds of copy editing, reference checking, typesetting, ebook formatting, managing contacts for contributors, sending out free copies, indexing, website maintenance, and some marketing.

Quaker Studies panels at AAR

There were two Quaker Studies panels at the American Academy of Religion conference this year. The first was about Quakers in Africa and Asia. Oscar Malande spoke about the relationship between Quakerism and African traditional religions, tracing how they have interacted, and Andrew Taylor described two Quaker missions to China – one evangelical and one liberal – and how they played out very differently. 

A picture I took while Oscar was giving his paper – the lighting wasn’t brilliant with the window behind the speakers but this gives you some idea of the panel at the table and the rest of us listening.

The second panel was titled ‘History, Secularism and the Quakers’. Izzak Novak gave a paper which used the writings of a early 20th century Quaker, Eleanor Darlington, to help refuse the false dichotomy between the religious and the secular, arguing in particular that liberal religion is just as religious as more conservative forms of religion. The other paper in the panel was mine – I outlined a big project I’m just starting, about the history of Quaker history. I’m asking questions about how Quaker history has been created and how it has been used, especially in accessible or popular sources like historical fiction, children’s books, and other cultural productions. More on this project in, err, maybe a few years!

Denver Friends Church

One of the things I really wanted to do, on the one Sunday I was in the US, was to attend programmed worship. As a member of Britain Yearly Meeting where we practice mainly unprogrammed worship (we have some semi-programmed, like all-age worship or a Christmas service in some places, and I believe there’s one programmed meeting in London), programmed worship is something I’ve often read about, and been reminded to include, but other than via Zoom it’s not usually accessible to me. So on the Sunday morning I went to Denver Friends Church – there’s also an unprogrammed meeting in Denver, but I had to choose, so sorry I missed you! 

Inside Denver Friends Church, before worship. The drum kit wasn’t used, but the guitars and piano accompanied the singing, with the words on the large screens. Not all the chairs were filled but it didn’t feel empty, either – I was in good time and took this picture before others arrived.

What was it like? The worship had three main sections – singing, open worship, and a Bible-based talk. I didn’t know any of the songs, but fortunately the words were all put up in a nice presentation (easier to look up and sing than having to hold your hymn book just so!). I didn’t find the words hugely moving but I enjoyed the music and the whole-hearted way people participated in the singing. 

The open worship was unprogrammed in the sense of not being planned, but had very little in common with unprogrammed worship in the British tradition. There was very little silence. As soon as one person had finished speaking, someone else began. And the focus of most contributions was on asking for prayer – there were a few which gave thanks for a prayer answered, but most asked either for prayer for the speaker or someone they knew personally. At one point someone’s request for healing was answering with a gathering-round, laying on hands and praying for him specifically. 

In many ways this felt very natural, and it’s in keeping with both broader Quaker traditions and other churches. Early Friends were happy to pray for healing. I’ve done laying on of hands in other churches, too; it can be misused, but when everyone involved is comfortable it can be a very meaningful and immediate response to someone’s suffering. There was a spontaneity to this ministry – the need for prayer was answered with prayer – where the same request in a British meeting would be met with silence and perhaps someone from the pastoral care committee looking for a chance to chat later. It was also immediate and heartfelt, where some ministry in British meetings tends to the abstract. 

Some other things which might have appeared in spoken ministry in Britain, including lessons drawn from life experience and reflections on the tradition, were more present in the Bible talk given by the pastor. I found it useful to explore a Bible passage in detail, but I had questions both about the translation and the conclusion. The pastor’s preferred version is the New Living Translation, and having recently watched the documentary 1946, about the problems of using the modern term ‘homosexual’ in the translation of the Bible, I was very aware of the potential flaws in that text. (One of the benefits of reading the Bible on my phone in church – and I was very glad they gave a wifi code so I could do that easily – was that I could flip back and forth between the translation under discussion, and some others which I consider to be either more scholarly and/or more aligned with my politics.) And although I agreed with his main conclusion, which was about working every day to be closer to what God wants us to be, I didn’t think that installing Covenant Eyes software (which aims to block porn, but probably also blocks anything LGBTQI+ related) would be the right way forward for me. 

Cars, buses, trains, dry air, and snow

The least said about being in Greensboro and not able to drive, the better. I did cross the road from my hotel to a shop on foot… but I wished I hadn’t. Fortunately, Wess and family and friends were very generous about lifts! 

On the other hand, Denver was a welcoming city from this point of view. I left the airport and easily got on a train to the city centre, then a free bus to a stop only one block away from my hotel. The hotel and the conference centre were within walking distance, and on Sunday I was able to use buses to get to church (and back) without any problems. The fares were simple, clearly explained on the website, and the stops were announced regularly. There was even a notice, in English and Spanish, explaining that they are reviewing their fares with the aim of creating a more equitable fare structure. Excellent work on that front, Denver!

This giant blue bear sculpture stands outside the convention centre in Denver, a handy landmark for meeting people. In this picture you can also see some of the weather – snow on the ground, ice on the paths in places, and a bright, cold, dry, clear blue sky.

And it wouldn’t be right to finish this post without some comments on the weather. In Guilford it was mostly nice – we had one day of rain, but otherwise dry, and in fact I struggled with the dry air which tended to make me cough. In Denver it was dry but cold – snow had fallen before I arrived, and although it had mostly been cleared from the paths, it was lying with no plans to move. What was most striking from a British point of view is that everyone was ignoring it. No snowballs, no snowmen, no playing around – in England snow is a novelty and if there’s even a little, there will be a tiny snowman melting on a lawn the next day. In Denver, it’s more like a fact of life and there was none of that.

Meeting in Silence? Quakers and Inter-religious Ritual

I wrote the following as a conference paper, for a conference on Inter-religious Ritual which was held in Glasgow early in 2020. It’s been sitting around for a while – I hoped some of it might contribute to a book chapter, but that hasn’t been possible. Recently, Mark Russ wrote in a blog post called Should Quakers Drop ‘Worship’ to be More Inclusive? that “this kind of pluralism treats Quaker Meeting as an empty space in which we can all play our own individual games of solitaire.”

It reminded me of this paper – specifically, that I had written before about how Quaker worship might be silent but that doesn’t mean it’s blank. Instead, in this paper I argue that practices of silence (including Quaker worship, moments of interfaith silence, and Remembrance Day silences) can be rich with content, and that we can notice this when we look at the rules which create the silent practice. I might put some of these points differently today, but have resisted the temptation to start re-writing the whole thing; I don’t expect everyone to agree with it all, but hope it’s a helpful exploration of one possible way of thinking about this.

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A Quaker who is also a member of the committee for a local interfaith group explained to me a while ago that their committee meetings begin and end with a short period of silence. This practise was introduced by the Quakers, she told me, and everyone else likes it too. Although I haven’t been able to check either of those claims, they both seem plausible. From her point of view as a Quaker, this account makes it seem that everyone is welcomed by this Quaker practice. Quakers often suggest such silences for inclusion in interfaith ritual – ranging from two to perhaps ten minutes. It is common to make the assumption that everyone can participate in silence, at least for short periods, and that silence contains no theological content – nothing you could disagree with. In this paper, I want to explore this claim enough to see whether, theoretically, it might be true or not, and to suggest some ways in which silence might be disruptive or objectionable. To do this, I am going to look briefly at what silence is and how it is used in the Quaker context, compare this with the ways in which silence can be used in interreligious ritual, raise what I think are some of the significant problems, and finally offer an example from the Quaker tradition which makes them explicit.

If you know one thing about Quakers, it’s probably that… well, actually, it’s probably that Quakers are pacifists or that some porridge sellers used their name because it sounded honest. But if you know one thing about Quaker practice, it’s probably that Quakers worship in silence. Although some Quakers internationally have developed other forms of worship, the use of silence – or what might be better described as unprogrammed worship – is an important Quaker tradition and remains the most widely used form of Quaker worship in Europe, many parts of North America, Southern Africa, and other places.

The aim of Quaker silence is stillness – to “give over thine own willing” – but also listening – to hear the “still small voice” of “that of God within”. Allowing space for these complex processes, Quaker meeting for worship usually allows about an hour of silence. The first part of the process might be compared with the submission to the will of God of other faith traditions, such as Islam, although it is also often compared to the quieting of the mind characteristic of some forms of Buddhist practice. The second part, listening for God’s voice, gives rise to a practice which might be better compared to a charismatic or Pentecostal church tradition, as Quakers “feel led” or are moved to speak into the silence. This practice, of giving spoken ministry as directed by the movement of the Spirit, arises from silence but clarifies that silence itself is a tool used in Quaker worship rather than the core of the Quaker worship practice. Using terminology drawn from Wittgenstein’s talk of ‘language-games’ (things like telling a joke or asking for something), I sometimes talk about ‘religion-games’. In order to be playing the Quaker worship religion-game, the rules have to allow for the possibility of spoken ministry, even if on a particular occasion nobody is so moved. 

The silence used in interreligious ritual is probably not of this type. Very roughly, I distinguish between two religion-games which both look like short silences: one where the purpose is to be fully present and settle oneself in the silence, and one where the purpose is to recall personally aspects of some specific theme. The silences described to me as being used at the interfaith committee meeting where probably of the first type – a short pause in which people were able to focus on the task at hand, setting aside other concerns. A Quaker grace, a short period of silence before or during a meal, would probably be of the second type, especially if someone introducing it directs the diners to “give thanks for food and fellowship” or something similar. Indeed, both types of silences are used among Quakers – but sometimes, especially a longer pause at the beginning or end of a committee meeting, can be under the full rules of Quaker worship, so that from time to time someone will speak during it. Thoughts on the work before the committee or requests for ‘upholding’, a Quaker form of supportive or intercessory prayer, are common. 

However, both forms of silence can also avoid this characteristic of Quaker worship. Unless someone tests it, it can be difficult to know in a specific case whether it would be acceptable – but we can give examples where it would certainly be unacceptable. Consider a silence of the second type, the pause for remembrance often used in churches and secular spaces on occasions of national importance. If the group have been asked to hold a two minute silence to remember the fallen, for example, giving spoken ministry during that silence is clearly inappropriate. It is a silence, but not a Quaker silence, because although one might be open to hearing the voice of God during that time, it would be socially unacceptable to act on any promptings to share that message with others. If the silences used in interreligious ritual are of this kind – and in my experience they frequently are, even when introduced by Quakers – it isn’t clear that they are specifically Quaker silences, since they don’t follow the rules for Quaker silent or unprogrammed worship.

If that’s so, why are the claims about the universal accessibility of silence so attractive and why do Quakers like to see themselves are offering something particular when they suggest silence as a mode of interreligious participation? Perhaps they’re just egotistical! Any group can fall into the trap of imagining that what they do is unique and that they make a special contribution, when this is not in fact the case. I’m sure that there is some of this happening. However, I think there are also some other dynamics at work. 

Firstly, it is true that there is a universality about not speaking. Chris Lord, a PhD student at Birmingham, is currently working on the connections between silent worship practices and animal rights – he argues that even for animals like humans which can speak, refraining from speaking may be a way to come closer to a non-human animal consciousness and form bonds of equality, not just between humans, but across species. Demographic data on Quakers might lead us to question some of the assumptions here – the use of silence in Quaker worship does not actually result in a fully just faith community where people of all ethnicities and social backgrounds are included equally – but it does get at something true about the experience of silence as something which can be, whether of choice or necessity, shared across cultural and other boundaries. 

Secondly, there are also the psychological aspects of silence. It may be good for your mind, as recent studies have suggested, but it can also be daunting. One of the reasons I think Quakers often back down from offering true Quaker worship in interreligious spaces is that it requires a long period of silence, perhaps at least ten or fifteen minutes, in a world where the two minutes of remembrance is often felt to be a long period of public silence! In open silence, many people find unwanted thoughts rising up – meditation teachers offer a wide range of techniques to deal with this, suggesting that it’s an extremely common experience – and some may find that silence triggers specific recollections of trauma or reminds them of previous distressing circumstances. Particularly of interest here are those for whom silence is a reminder of being silenced, either speaking and being ignored or being unable to speak for whatever reason. The silence of Quaker worship can come with other rules which turn out to silence some voices, but it is intended to have space for people – and through them, God – to speak. Public silences which do not allow that possibility may be even more distressing.

Thirdly, although silence in all its complexity and difficulty is universal in some ways, the decision to champion it is relatively unusual in modern society. This is not just about recent developments in terms of technology, but might date back to the industrial revolution or before – the attitude wider society takes to silence is deeply bound up with ideas about waiting, wasting time, and the need to be productive. Many traditions could bring silent practices to offer in interreligious spaces, but at the moment, it seems that Quakers often take the role of championing this option.

They may do so for the wrong reasons. The choice of Quaker worship is often related to a desire to embrace the creedless and non-doctrinaire approach which Quakers take to theology. In Britain today, the average age of becoming a Quaker was 43 in a recent study, and many of those people who arrive at Quaker worship have previous experience of one or more other religious traditions. There’s a strong sense sometimes that people embrace Quaker silence because they see it as open to all interpretations and as having no theological content. This is understandable because of the Quaker rejection of creeds and frequently refusal to discuss theology in formal ways – people should discover theological truths for themselves, through experience – but it also underestimates the amount of theological content which is present in the rules of the Quaker worship religion-game.

To set out in silence to listen for the voice of God (or the movement of the Spirit, or the Inner Light, or any number of other ways which Quakers might express this process), participants need to accept that there is something to listen for, speaking now, and that it can be heard through this route. Members of other faiths may not accept these claims for all sorts of theologically well-grounded reasons. (How do you know it was God you heard and not Satan? If you want to know what God says, why not read the Bible or Quran? If God is internal or maybe non-existent or irrelevant to our path to enlightenment, why think of it in these terms?) Quakers can suggest answers to many of these questions, but they are usually not raised or addressed in the context of interreligious liturgy. Instead, the sense of silence as a universal is allowed to stand instead.

To close this paper, I want to offer an example of time when Quakers – noticing some of the issues which I raise here – rejected a silence which was felt to be too secular and to be serving purposes which opposed Quaker ones. I give this example to explore a case in which Quakers themselves were aware of the theological laden and open quality of Quaker silence, as opposed to some other silences. This symbolic rejection of silence took place at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, where my colleague Mark Russ and some others left the building before a Remembrance Day silence was held inside. Instead, they gathered around an apple tree in the garden and sang a peace-themed Taize chant. (The relationship between Taize and Quaker practice is a paper for another day!) When I asked Mark about this, he explained that he had felt the silence in remembrance of war was too secular and lacked freedom of choice; it seemed imposed from outside and the reasons for holding it were not in line with his pacifist convictions. It was a silencing silence, rather than one into which people would be free to speak if moved by God to do so.

What I think is happening in this case is the reverse of the interfaith cases I discussed earlier. Rather than silence being seen as empty and universal, the Remembrance Day silence is clearly located in a social context which links it to specific previous events – and, sometimes, to specific views of those events, including the idea that remembrance can be used for political purposes or to justify future war rather than as a reminder of the need to work for peace. If Quakers took this view more widely, they might be more cautious about both imposing silences on others, and about clarifying the rules of Quaker silence. A moment’s hush can be universal, or at least widely beneficial, for practical and psychological as well as spiritual reasons. But we should be careful about any claims that this practice is specifically Quaker. The rules of Quaker worship are not those of a minute’s silence, and just because silences seem superficially similar, we should not make the mistake of assuming they are the same or interchangeable. 

New Book! The Quaker World

It’s here! Wess Daniels and I have been working on this book for years – with more than 60 chapters by an international team of more than 50 contributors, it’s been a huge project. The Quaker World won’t be the final word on the topics it covers but aims to explore the breadth of Quaker studies and highlight a wide range of scholarship in the field.

[Image: in a cardboard box with some packing paper, copies of a large hardback book called The Quaker World, edited by Rhiannon Grant and Wess Daniels, published by Routledge, with a image of tree-covered hills.]

The intended audience is mainly students – this might be useful for a undergraduate course on Quaker Studies, or as supporting material for a range of other undergraduate courses. It will give an introduction to the diversity of the Quaker movement for people starting research or wanting to compare Quakers with other religious groups. It could be used by A-level students who want to read a chapter on Quakers and equality, or peace, or sexuality, or many other topics which come up in essays. It would be useful for a researcher who thinks Quakers might be relevant, but isn’t sure where to start.

As such, the publisher’s pricing reflects the idea that it will mainly be bought by libraries, especially university libraries. As an editor, I know there will also be interest in the Quaker community, but it will be difficult for individuals to buy. Could you recommend it to a library near you? That could be a university library, if you have access (many have arrangements for local people as well as students and staff), or a local council or city library, or a library run by your Quaker meeting or Friends Church. If you want to buy, there are some less expensive options: there’s a discount on pre-orders at the moment, or you can ask me for a discount code, and the ebook and paperback will be cheaper than the hardback.

When you do get a copy, you’ll find 61 chapters in three sections: Global Quakerism, Spirituality, and Embodiment. You’ll find some names of scholars you probably recognise, and hopefully some new names as well. Wess and I specifically set out to find people working around the world and in different contexts to provide fresh perspectives. You’ll find biography chapters which put Quaker principles into the context of real lives, and chapters which explore Quaker history, and chapters which are realistic about Quakers today. From autobiography and animals to worship, workcamps, and young adults, this book covers almost the entire Quaker World. Let me know what we should have put in for Z.

so you found Quakers on the internet…

You’ve seen a Tweet, TikTok, or other social media post about Quakers, and they sound great. Or you’ve read a Wikipedia article or a blog post or you’re just curious… you want to know more about Quakers. Where can you go?

In this blog post, I’ll run through three basic options for finding out more, depending what you want to know. In short, these are: the practical method, where you meet Quakers and try out Quaker worship; the more information method, where you learn more about Quakers in theory; and the historical approach, where you explore Quakers as they have been in the past. Of course, you don’t have to pick just one.

Practical. If you want to try out Quaker worship, what can you do? You can start on your own, right now, by looking for ways to be calm and quiet, and listen for an inner voice that helps you to understand things better and make good choices. Most Quakers find that our method works better in company, and you have options for that as well. Since you’ve found Quakers on the internet, you might want to try a Quaker meeting for worship online. There are some which are public, and you can just turn up: Woodbrooke and Ben Lomond Quaker Centre, for example. Many Quaker communities which meet in person also have an online element – to get the details for these, you usually need to contact the specific community you want to join. A selection are listed by the Friends World Committee for Consultation. And you can find an in person meeting by searching online: Friends Around the World is a good starting place, or there may be a more local database such as Britain Yearly Meeting’s Find a Meeting.

Theoretical. If you want to know more about Quakers in theory, you have lots of choices depending how you’d like to get your information. There are probably the widest range of choices for people who like to read: free leaflets to download, websites to explore, and books such as my Quakers Do What! Why?. If you’d like to see videos, QuakerSpeak is the big one, and check out srekauq on YouTube. For shorter bites, you could explore the TikTok channels run by Makenzie Morgan, Rory Kennison, and me. There are also some Quaker podcasts if you prefer to listen: you could start with A Quaker Take and Quaker Faith & Podcast. Lots more resources for this approach are linked from Wess Daniels’ Quakerism 101 page.

Historical. Perhaps you’ve interested in Quakers because you have Quaker family or ancestors, or because they’ve come up in relation to another area of history you’re interested in – the founding of America and especially Pennsylvania; the Civil War and Commonwealth in 17th Century England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; or lots of other times and places. Finding out about Quakers today, through either of the methods above, might not answer your questions. In fact, because Quakers have changed a lot in some ways, it might just leave you more confused – if you want to know about Quakerplain dress, and you visit a Quaker meeting today, you’re unlikely to come away much clearer, because very few Quakers wear plain dress now. For a very quick starting point (5 minutes), this video by Young Friends in Richmond is good. You could also try the free three-week course from FutureLearn, Radical Spirituality or Pink Dandelion’s book An Introduction to Quakerism. If you want to dive deeper, you could start with this research guide from the TriCollege libraries, or contact the Library of the Society of Friends or the Friends Historical Library. To search for an individual, the family history website Ancestry has lots of Quaker records digitised and the Quaker Family History Society may be able to help.

What do you want to learn about Quakers? What resources have helped you? Please comment below with questions and suggestions.