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White America’s Myth of the Black Male

• Authored by:
• David Zarembka

I received more reaction to my posting, The Iconification of Nelson Mandela and American Racism, than for any other of the 257 postings that I had done in almost seven years. Some of the responses were supportive, some critical, and some “yes, but.” Below is my original newsletter article, followed by a sampling of the responses.

On Patriotism (January 2014)

On Time

• Authored by:
• Mary Klein

If we’re lucky enough to live long enough, we get to watch the miracle of babies turning into adults. And with that luck, we pay the price of watching tangible people in our lives turning into memories. And we watch those memories taking on lives of their own.  A baby’s first word, a teen’s first love, anybody’s last wishes – these moments burst onto the scene, disappear, and then echo.

On Time (March 2014)

Do Quakers Mean Business?

• Authored by:
• Rob Pierson

Recently a Methodist church invited me to a book study. They had been reading books on ethically based business, including Deborah Cadbury’s Chocolate Wars, and had grown wildly curious about these peculiar Quakers and their century and a half of confectionary success. The group leader tabulated a list of famous Quaker business leaders – not only in cocoa, but also in ironwork, railways, footwear, chinaware, household goods, pharmaceuticals, and banking. Why, she asked, was the list so long? Why were there so many Friendly industrial innovators? Why so many business names they now recognized as Quaker – from Cadbury chocolates to Barclays bank to Clarks shoes? What was it about this relatively small, seemingly austere, and ethically demanding faith that drove such a disproportionate share of business enterprise?

On Production (May 2014)

Race to Incarcerate, A Graphic Retelling - Review

• Authored by:
• Maya Wright

Written by Sabrina Jones and Marc Mauer

On Pride (July 2014)

Your Sons and Your Daughters will Prophesy

• Authored by:
• Jonathan Vogel-Borne

Excerpts from a presentation to Pacific Yearly Meeting; July 15, 2014; Walker Creek Ranch, Petaluma, California

On Family (September 2014)

A Field Guide to Evil

• Authored by:
• Bruce Folsom

Whether we talk about it or not, we hold strong views about evil. So I’d like to share with you some vocabulary about evil that I’ve learned, which can allow us to describe evil a little more accurately than we usually do, especially when our feelings get roused up. I’m not interested in catastrophic evil or cosmic evil. I’m interested in the day-to-day stuff – the times I forget to say thank-you or the times I take a shortcut and inadvertently hurt somebody else who doesn’t take the shortcut.

On Temptation (November 2014)

All Against the Haul

• Authored by:
• Susan Estep

Susan Estep is a founding member of All Against the Haul, an environmental action coalition supported by Friends in Montana. It was formed to stop the construction of a permanent industrial corridor for massively oversized loads of oil production equipment – longer-than-a-football-field megaloads – through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana to the Alberta Tar Sands mine. Susan spoke by phone with Western Friend on October 23, 2014. Following are edited excerpts from a transcript of that interview.

On Temptation (November 2014)

Not the Final Word

• Authored by:
• David Hartsough

Part of my dad’s job with the American Friends Service Committee was to take speakers around to various college campuses, churches, and summer institutes. As a kid, I sometimes went along and got to meet such spiritual giants as peace activist A.J. Muste and civil rights leaders Bayard Rustin and Ralph Abernathy. During spring vacation in 1956, my dad decided to take my brother Paul and me to Montgomery, where the bus boycott was four months old.

On Difference (July 2015)

On Difference

• Authored by:
• Mary Klein

A six-year-old girl in South Carolina wrote a letter this summer. “Dear Daddy: I know you were shot at the Church and you went to Heaven. I love you so much! I know you love me and I know that you know that I love you too . . . Your baby girl and grasshopper.” Take more time to feel the sadness of that. Take more time to feel the wrongness of that.

On Difference (July 2015)

An Invitation to Play with God

• Authored by:
• Melinda Wenner Bradley

“In Godly Play, the invitation is given not for play in general but for play with the language of God and God’s people; our sacred stories, parables, liturgical actions and silences. Through this powerful language, through our wondering, through the community of players gathered together, we hear the deepest invitation of all: an invitation to come play with God.”        – Jerome W Berryman, The Complete Guide to Godly Play (2002)

On Play (September 2015)