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Hiking Naked (review)

• Authored by:
• John Brantingham

Hiking Naked is a memoir that explores ways that Friends in the medical field stretch themselves beyond their emotional limits, and how Iris Graville attempted to bring herself back into balance. Graville is a mother of two, a wife, and a nurse who works for the Health Department in Belleview, Washington. Her job is serious, and the stakes are high for the people in underserved communities she works with, so she gives herself fully to her job – emotionally, physically, and spiritually. By the time we join her, she is dealing with burnout.

On Expansion (May 2018)

Twenty Nickels Make a Dollar

• Authored by:
• Keith Scott Dickerson

Although I thought I had gone to medical school to become a clinician, it turns out now, twenty-plus years into my medical career, that I actually went to become a teacher. Early on, it became apparent that others viewed me as a good teacher. I did indeed enjoy teaching, so I chose to become a physician teacher of resident physicians and medical students, a role I have filled for the last sixteen years.

On Teachers (September 2020)

Botany on an Endangered Planet

• Authored by:
• Barbara Goodrich Phillips

I have spent my whole life learning about the natural world. I am a professional botanist whose career was focused for fifty-plus years on trying to use science to understand and “save” specific unusual components of our earth’s ecosystems. I have learned a lot about climate change over the many years since Al Gore published Earth in the Balance in 1992, which my life partner, Dr. Charles Avery, used as a textbook in his Northern Arizona University conservation classes.  However, in recent decades, I have become increasingly sad, frustrated, angry, and sometimes depressed that humans in general, and climate-change-deniers in particular, are threatening the health of our whole earth.

On Science (November 2022)

Adam’s Mushrooms: an interview with Adam DeLeo

• Authored by:
• Caitlin Churchill

It took a couple of years, obviously, to build it up to something substantial, which was a terrifying time because I was all in. Suddenly, I had to make something happen of it. There wasn't a plan B per se, neither of us have college degrees.

Vocation (April 2025)

racism in Light

Do No Harm

• Authored by:
• Muriel Strand

On Innocence (May 2024)

Our Highest Intention

• Authored by:
• Jaimie Mudd

On Prayer (March 2024)

Weighty Friends and Quaker Pharisees

• Authored by:
• Steve Smith

Wouldst thou be a prophet, or perhaps a saint? Alas, he who thinks he is, most likely aint.                 William Bacon Evans (1875-1964), Quaker writer and weighty Friend.

On Power (March 2013)

The Bonds of Animal Agriculture

• Authored by:
• Joseph Snyder

Since biblical times, humanity has lived by an ancient contract: We the first party (animals) give you our wool, milk, hides and meat, draw your plows and carriages, guard your houses, control your vermin, and fertilize your fields.  We the second party (humans) promise to keep you safe from predators, bind up your wounds and treat your diseases, provide you shelter from the elements, feed you even in times of famine, and provide you with a quick and humane death.  Our own human relationship with God has long been expressed in similar terms. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.  He makes me to lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.”

On Consumption (May 2013)

Morality of Animal Agriculture

• Authored by:
• Jim Anderson

To the editor: I appreciated and learned from Joe Snyder’s fine essay on the bonds of animal agriculture (May/June 2013). We have in many ways lost the balance of care, responsibility, and stewardship in our relationship with animals in what Joe calls the “monetization” of agriculture. He warns us that a simple rejection of the animal side of our food system, as some vegetarianism involves, may cause still more harm to nature, and even more death to living things. We need to hear this and develop a food system that respects our covenants with nature and sees the hazards of a simple “industrial” vegetarianism.

On Love (September 2013)