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Quaker Culture: Creativity

• Authored by:
• North Pacific Yearly Meeting

The creative impulse is part of being human, a gift from the Holy Spirit, and a way of finding a deep connection with our Creator. . .  Creativity can be a form of worship and witness, a ministry and a calling, a way of speaking out of the silence. Like other spiritual disciplines, creative expression carries the potential for spiritual transformation.

On Music (March 2018)

Quaker Culture: Creativity

• Authored by:
• Fritz Eichenberg

We hate to admit that we are confused, desperately longing for direction. We seem to deny that man was made in the image of God and that we are meant to be creative too, each in our own way. . . If the artist’s work is his worship, [then]. . . Greed will have to go. Greed, which is hunger for the power that money can buy . . . Speed will have to go. Speed, which kills the craftsman and his work, which spoils the enjoyment of nature, dulls our senses, prevents meditation and the maturing of a growing mind. . . We must recapture what we have lost; we must fight for our faith, fight our way back to God. We must become creative again, whole again, and aware of our responsibilities for a new moral order. (1952)

On Vision (January 2021)

Post-capitalist, post-racialized, eco-harmony

Right Sharing - Interview with Jackie Stillwell

Right Sharing - An Interview with Jackie Stillwell

• Authored by:
• Jackie Stillwell

Jacqueline Stillwell became the general secretary of Right Sharing of World Resources in January 2015. She is a life-long Friend with many years’ experience working with not-for-profit organizations and Quaker organizations, including twenty-two years as Head of School for The Meeting School in Rindge, New Hampshire, and four years service as the presiding clerk of New England Yearly Meeting. Jackie spoke by phone with Western Friend on April 5, 2016. The following text is an edited transcript of portions of that interview. A more complete depiction of the interview can be found in the Western Friend online library.

On Limits (May 2016)

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)

On Art

• Authored by:
• Mary Klein

I love to quote Frank Zappa on this, “Your life is a ribbon of time that you get to decorate.” Early Friends were rightly wary of decoration. They dissented from “high church” practices of pomp and circumstance, oratory and argumentation, frankincense and anointing oils. They were rightly wary of self-proclaimed prophets, state-funded theocrats, and peddlers of political revolutions and snake oil. In probably the first written expression of Quaker faith and practice, the Elders at Balby advised, “[As] any are moved of the Lord to speak the Word of the Lord . . . [it should] be done in faithfulness, without adding or diminishing.” (1656) Then just a few decades later, London Yearly Meeting extended this idea further and gave their “tender and Christian advice that Friends take care to keep to truth and plainness, in language, habit, deportment and behavior . . . and to avoid . . . all vain and superfluous fashions of the world.” (1691)

On Art (March 2020)

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)

Creating out of Silence and Light

• Authored by:
• Linda Seger

In the late 1960s, a researcher named Frank Barron explored the relationship of religion and creativity and whether being religious and/or spiritual had an effect on the artist. He interviewed Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and a Hindu, as well as a number of others. The interviews were quite straightforward until he talked about the Quaker artist. His writing about this artist took a different turn. It was as if he was stopped in his tracks and felt a different tone in this interview. Reading the interview was like reading a hush or silence or something that was going deeper in its connections. He says, “She spoke of the Quaker silences. She thinks everyone should be silent at special times. . . [She] was quite unusual in bearing and demeanor, and in her manner of talking. She spoke in a very low and even tone, and everything she said seemed to come up from depths. She was completely lacking in social front.” (Frank Barron, 1968)

On Alternatives (March 2022)

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)