Anthony Manousos

Dear Editor: Thanks for another great issue of Western Friend. I was inspired/provoked to write this response to a couple of the articles you published in the May/June 2023 issue.

Quakers: The Quiet Revolutionaries
by The Gardner Documentary Group
reviewed by Anthony Manousos

Dear Editor: I loved the article by Julie Harlow in the March/April issue of Western Friend. She really touched my heart with her honesty, commitment, and vision for authentic Quakerism. Like Julie, I was deeply involved in Soviet-American reconciliation work in the 1980s.

In January this year, I submitted an article to Western Friend about Friends and the “Beloved Community,” and I received the best rejection letter ever.

Eight years ago, I married Jill Shook, a housing justice advocate and Evangelical Christian who loves Jesus and justice. She also loves Quakers and attends Orange Grove Meeting (and the Methodist Church). The more I walk or drive around Pasadena with her, the more I see a side of this city that I never even imagined before.

Dear Editor: I deeply appreciate your publishing my poem “On Garbage” in the Nov/Dec 2017 issue of Western Friend, but I was disappointed that a word was omitted from the penultimate line. It should have read:

Only love matters. Only love turns junk into jewelry,

A crown of thorns into a crown of light.

I sing and celebrate garbage,
the rejected, the refugee,
The “wretched refuse yearning to breathe free.”
I lift up in the Light those treated like trash,
Those living in the junk yards of history.

Out of blackened wood from a bombed out church,
A black Southern artist made a mobile that took my breath away

“We are tired of smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society,” said Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963). To address this crisis, Dr. King (along with Quaker activist Bayard Rustin) launched the Poor People’s Campaign, focusing on economic justice, especially around jobs and housing.