Quaker Ranter

On Sunday my meeting hosted an open house to reintroduce ourselves to our neighbors. Although the meeting has grown from five years ago—when only two people regularly showed up at worship—like all social bodies, we continue to have ups and downs. A few illnesses have recently drawn some beloved regulars away. I’m convinced that regrowing a meeting is a 10-year project, at lea...

My Quaker Talk interview with S.E.W. Smith, in which we talk about living with the eternal now and 200-year present. His article, Restore the Time, appears in the October issue of Friends Journal.

I talked with Jack Tripp, who teaches ninth and eleventh grade English at the same Quaker school he himself attended a decade or so ago. With a religious tradition as fiercely anti-creedal as ours—and one that has morphed and evolved into various contradictory forms—how do we describe ourselves? The problem is heightened in a Quaker school settings, where only a fraction of s...