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Free Will (news item)

The Earth will be Fine

• Authored by:
• Marian Rhys

Dear Editor: Many thanks to Kate McClellan for her letter in the November/December 2018 Western Friend. I appreciated her pointing out that the climate crisis and other environmental crises are not really going to affect the earth fundamentally, but only the biosphere of the earth (which includes us, homo sapiens). The earth will be just fine with or without us. We are not really trying to save the earth; we are trying to save ourselves. What an arrogant species we are!

On Weapons (January 2019)

Emancipation without Freedom

• Authored by:
• José Santos Woss,
• Aristotle Jones

Racism and white supremacy, the malignant cancers plaguing America today, are a joint system destroying black and brown bodies. In the past, the Klan did that destroying. Today, statistics do. Those statistics amount to the erasure of people. The destruction of black and brown bodies is hidden in statistics on poor health, poor housing, inadequate schooling, over-policed communities, and mass incarceration. These social ills, which overwhelmingly affect black and brown communities, are ills that Friends can help to correct. With the realization of their whiteness and their dominant position within a racialized country, Friends have the power to define spaces outside their communities, as well as the opportunity to break the past and change the future of race relations.

On Politics (July 2017)

When will it be enough? (news item)

Be a CASA

• Authored by:
• Lynn Dixon,
• John Dixon

Be a CASA – Court Appointed Special Advocate

On Puzzles (April 2019)

Communities Without Policing (news item)

What is Tribe?

• Authored by:
• David Zarembka

I was living in the Mua Hills of Kenya in 1969, an area where the Kamba tribe is predominant. One day I was walking down the road and noticed a group of Maasai – the Kenyan tribe beloved by tourists – at the home of a local villager. Kamba and Maasai cultures are quite different from each other. The Kamba care for small farms – growing corn, beans, bananas, and other crops, along with a few cows, goats, sheep, and chickens. The Maasai are a pastoral people who traditionally raised cattle and lived off them, including drinking their blood.

On Children (September 2018)

Be Not Afraid

• Authored by:
• Sandy Farley

Dear Friends: When an angel, according to biblical records, encounters a living human being, the first thing the angel says is. “Fear not!” or “Be not afraid!” or words to that effect.

On Beginning (March 2016)

What is Worship? (news item)

What is the Light?

• Authored by:
• Todd Swanson

George Fox described himself during his early adulthood as “a man of sorrows in the times of the first workings of the Lord in me.” Shortly later, he stated, “After this did a pure fire appear in me, a spiritual discerning came into me.” By the following year, while he was 24, a major transformation had occurred, “In the year 1648, as I was sitting in a Friend’s house . . . I saw there was a great crack to go throughout the earth, and a great smoke to go as the crack went, and that after the crack, there should be a great shaking. This was the earth in people’s hearts which was to be shaken before the Seed of God was to be raised out of the earth . . . and great meetings we began to have.” He discerned the reason for this change was because “the Lord God had opened to me by his invisible power how every man was enlightened by the divine Light of Christ; and I saw it shine through all.”

On Heritage (July 2016)