The art of exercising the faculty of thinking, and reflecting upon every object that is seen, ought to constitute a material branch of a good education . . .
CECILIA: How comes it, Sophia, that I am so often idle, and my thoughts wander from what I am about, when I really intend to be good?
SOPHIA: You are very young, my dear, and mamma says that the habit of attention is difficult to form; but that by steadily endeavoring to fix our thoughts on one object we shall every day... Read more.
Warner Mifflin, Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist
Written by Gary B. Nash
Reviewed by Emily M. Teipe
In Warner Mifflin, Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist, Professor Gary B. Nash brings to life a long-neglected leader of the Quaker abolitionist movement. Although largely unknown to historians and scholars, Mifflin was known and admired by his contemporaries – including such... Read more.
Organelles, cells, organs, organisms, families, cultures, planets – these bodies nest within each other in irregular concentricity, one within the next, each encased by its own semi-permeable boundary. In the jigsaw puzzle of incarnation, all the pieces slip and slide, expand and contract, ignite and extinguish, push, pull, infiltrate, and emerge. There, but for the grace of God, go I. Wondrous beings abound all around, in places where I am not.
Only in fleeting glimpses can the... Read more.
Dear Editor: The articles in Jan/Feb 2019 issue, “On Weapons,” speak my mind and enrich my thinking, each in its own way. In particular, after reading Timothy Jarvis’s call for finding a way to work on moving our local police forces back to a “Serve and Protect” mindset and then Val Liveoak’s history of Friends Peace Teams, I found myself wondering if it is time for bringing the work of the Peace Teams to the United States. Perhaps this could provide a framework for Friends who are called to... Read more.
Dear Friends: A few years ago, a friend of mine came to his first-ever Quaker Meeting. Salim is an Indian actor, a Sufi, a Reiki master. I was nervous in case the ministry didn’t speak to him. But he came out of that meeting having loved the silence and feeling that the ministry had flowed organically from it. “But,” he said, “you’re all so incredibly serious. What you need is a Quaker mirthquake.”
Spiritual life doesn’t need to be solemn. Laughter can build community and open up the... Read more.
Dear Friends: Albuquerque Meeting supported our friend Emma in sanctuary for twenty-one months. [See the July/August 2017 issue of Western Friend.]
Emma learned to paint while living in sanctuary. She calls her calls her work “Paintings for Peace,” and some of us have helped her set up a business to convert her charming paintings into greeting cards, which depict flowers, birds, moonlit skies and landscapes... Read more.
Like many Friends, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in my youth. The Peace Corps Act includes three goals for volunteers: do a job, introduce host country locals to a U.S. young person (usually young), and bring an awareness of the host country’s culture and history back to the U.S. Of those three goals, far and away the most difficult has been that last one. Family and friends typically enjoy hearing a few stories, seeing a few pictures (even a slide show back in the day), but any in-depth... Read more.
