Western Friend logo and header image

Search

A search result that only shows a person's name often links to a list of articles written by that person.

New Structures, New Life

Authored by: Norma Silliman
Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends (SCYMF) is a relatively new addition to the yearly meetings of Friends in the West. Many SCYMF Friends have been involved with other Western yearly meetings, formally and informally, for years, including involvement in “Convergent Friends” – a fellowship which has met occasionally for more than a decade, bringing together members of liberal “Friends Meetings” and Christian “Friends Churches.” Some of us have also participated for many years in the Pacific Northwest Quaker Women’s Theology Conferences, another opportunity for Friends from different branches to share ideas, worship, and fellowship. So, SCYMF is new, but not new.
On Conflict (January 2023)

Telling the Truth about God (review)

Authored by: Jim Anderson
Rhiannon Grant’s small book Telling the Truth about God (2019) is immediately engaging in its conversational style. She draws from her experience leading workshops at Woodbrooke in England and offers brief introductory chapters for both Friends and non-Friends. To the Quaker reader, she expresses the hope that, after the reading, “you feel that you are better able to tell the truth about God as you understand it.”
On Perception (March 2023)

Martyrs for Conscience’s Sake

Authored by: Bill Durland
“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” These words were written by Lord Acton in 1887. Throughout the ages, we have seen this: When autocrats exercise power corruptly, heroic persons stand up to challenge them. This essay is a brief history of just a few of the countless individuals who have spoken truth to power over the past 2500 years and who sacrificed their lives for it. Let us not forget them.
On Loss (May 2023)

A Red Sky

Authored by: Sarah Katreen Hoggatt

Two and a half years later, her voice still haunts me. From the other side of the fence, I hear her yell at her children as they play in the backyard. It’s a sunny day, and my wife and I are riding our bikes on a path that runs right beside this family’s home. We are enjoying a weekend vacation in Ashland, four hours south of our own home in Salem, Oregon. A blissful afternoon, we are all unaware that, just two days later, a fire will race up the path we’re riding on. It will level this entire neighborhood to the ground, including the mobile home we just passed, with the door that just clacked shut. Whole communities in several towns will be completely wiped out by just one fire – one of the many fires about to explode across our state. This particular fire, the Almeda fire, will consume 2,600 homes and three lives. Throughout the 2020 wildfire season in Oregon, at least twenty-one fires will each burn more than a thousand acres or cause significant structural damage or death. Over a million acres will burn, 40,000 people will be evacuated, and at least eleven people will be killed.

On Loss (May 2023)

Bittersweet Wisdom

Authored by: Earl Piercy
We all have something to say about loss, because all of us have experienced it – yearning for what used to be, but is no more. And perhaps, as our years pass, we wrestle with the issue of loss even more, having chewed some of the gristle of life, as it were, not just the low-hanging fruit.
On Loss (May 2023)

Loss in Two Voices

Authored by: Ann C. Stever , Dorsey Green
In November 2018, my family physician, Travis Abbott, who had known me for many years, referred me for a cognitive impairment screening. It was very helpful that Dorsey accompanied me to that screening. It was helpful for her to see what happened and for her to ask questions that I did not think of. I clearly had some areas that were not so good, but I was not formally diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment until January 2020.
On Loss (May 2023)

On Loss

Authored by: Mary Klein
Many Friends in the West today trace our religious ancestry back to the arrival of Joel and Hannah Bean in California in 1882. The monthly meeting that the Beans enlivened in San Jose eventually became the root stock of three new yearly meetings – Pacific, North Pacific, and Intermountain (to oversimplify). Thirty years earlier, Joel and Hannah had traveled with the pioneer “Bean wagon train” that relocated dozens of Beans from New England to the brand new “free state” of Iowa. The Beans were central in the formation of Iowa Yearly Meeting, and Joel and Hannah clerked its two constituent meetings (men’s and women’s) for about ten years.
On Loss (May 2023)