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Helen Currier

Not by Our Strength Alone - Unabridged

• Authored by:
• Becca Mohally Renk,
• Paul Mohally Renk

Not by My Strength Alone: Laboring Together Beyond Our Comfort Zones

On Love (September 2013)

Taking Time to Ask, “Why?”

• Authored by:
• Sarah Tarver-Wahlquist

My family does a lot at our meeting. I currently serve as clerk of our First Day School Committee, co-clerk of our Kitchen Committee, and I also sit on our half-yearly meeting’s Continuing and Nominating Committees. My husband fills the arduous and time-consuming role of clerk for our meeting’s House Committee, which cares for the physical home of our meeting, a 100-year-old house that requires near constant upkeep, and he is a regular teacher in our First Day School rotation. Many nights each week, we compete for the computer after our kids are in bed, each of us trying to coordinate committee meetings or write reports or request quotes for purchases needed by the meeting. And we spend most First Days scurrying around the meetinghouse, preparing coffee, and chatting with people about committee work.

On Time (March 2014)

Agree to Disagree

• Authored by:
• Vona Van Cleef

Dear Editor: I enjoyed your editorial in the last issue of Western Friend (Sept/Oct 2017), especially this: “Each Friends’ community must decide for itself what range of behaviors it can tolerate within its spiritual home. Some will feel called to walk closely beside those who ‘walk disorderly;’ some will feel called to try talking some sense into that guy in the castle; still others will feel called to stay home and bake bread.” I read that to my husband, because he’s the one who feels “called to stay home and bake bread.” Except for being the recording secretary for our El Paso meeting, he turns down every Quaker job he’s been asked to do – in spite of his considerable talents in reporting, writing, and editing! I don’t understand this, but he doesn’t understand my need to “go, do, and be,” either.

On Garbage (November 2017)

Child Protective Services

• Authored by:
• Timothy Clark

When I was a young man, I worked two years for Child Protective Services (CPS). It’s a strange job, going to people’s homes to talk to them about complaints that other people have made about how they treat their children.

On Children (September 2018)

Olive Rush and Her Legacy

• Authored by:
• Bettina Raphael

In 1966, the small Quaker meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was bequeathed its current home, the historic house and garden of the painter Olive Rush. It is already an unlikely occurrence for a Quaker meeting to have a patron, and even more so, for the benefactor to be an artist, given Friends’ long history of disparaging the arts as frivolous and vain. Thus, Santa Fe Meeting’s relationship with our “patron” is unique and has been a source of pride, as well as of controversy.

On Art (March 2020)

Tony Umile

Gerhard Fritzsche

Clifford Cole

Eric Conn