Friday, November 6, 2015

Hicks and Gurney Fight it Out at Silver Bay

Students in Steve Angell's "Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity" class this fall were asked to imagine a scenario in which Joseph John Gurney and Elias Hicks met up in a present-day context with which the students are familiar. Below is one of the resulting essays, from MDiv student John Edminster:



In the fantasy-narrative here unfolding, Elias Hicks (1748-1830) was brought back to be keynote speaker at New York Yearly Meeting’s 2016 Summer Sessions. While the Sessions Committee was arranging this, the Worship-at-Sessions Subcommittee decided to call up Joseph John Gurney (1788-1847) to lead evening Bible Study during the week. Some expressed concern that Friend Elias and Friend Joseph John[1] might not get along well, but the sense among the planners was, “we’re not a creedal religion, no one’s salvation depends on doctrinal correctness, and there’s that of God in every person, so there’s no good reason for them not to get along.” And that was that. At week’s end the Epistle Committee reported that Friends found their visits “stimulating.” But only those who attended knew how very stimulating they were.

Poor Joseph John: he’d no sooner gotten his name-tag on the Inn Porch than Friends started mobbing him about the FUM employment policy, LGBTQ concerns, and the environment. Eventually Ruth, a sensitive old-timer, took him off for a quiet cup of tea and brought him up to date on the issues that exercise Friends nowadays. Joseph John seemed dismayed that Biblical teachings weren’t among them. Ruth explained that though the yearly meeting has an advice[2] about Scripture-reading, Friends here pretty much let other Friends make what they like of Scripture – if it’s read at all. Some do; many don’t.


Thursday, October 22, 2015

A Review of "Early Quakers And Their Theological Thought, 1647-1723"

2015 ESR graduate John Connell reviews the recent release, Early Quakers And Their Theological Thought, 1647-1723, co-edited by ESR's Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion. 




The introduction of this volume, penned by editors Pink Dandelion and Stephen W. Angell, wastes no time in reminding readers why this is an important work: “Early Quakerism has always excited scholars.”[1] Indeed it has, and for good reason. Despite their fractured state, all groups of modern Quakers still look back to the early Friends to ground themselves in their own interpretation of Quakerism. In fact, early Friends have often been re-interpreted in different ways by subsequent generations in order to re-assure those later generations in their particular contemporary formulation of Quaker faith and practice. Thus, studies of early Friends are always sure to both inform and challenge modern Quakers as to their own interpretations and incarnations of the Society.
Early Quakers and Their Theological Thought, 1647-1723, is sure to inform and challenge both liberal and evangelical Friends alike to examine their current incarnations and perhaps thoughtfully consider the relationship they bear to the founding generation of this movement. There is much to recommend about this volume. The chapters are relatively short (under 20 pages), and yet jam-packed with details about each individual, and most importantly, copious snippets of their own words. There is no denying that the scholars involved are representative of the finest that Quaker Studies has to offer. The bibliography alone is worth having for its collected wealth of primary and secondary sources.
The challenge of any such project is to allow the subject of each profile to speak their own message clearly, without being obscured by the interpretive voice of the authors. With few exceptions, this book succeeds in meeting this challenge. Because the book is a collection of profiles, written by different authors—each uniquely selected as a qualified authority on their subject—this review will move through the book chapter by chapter.

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Jesus, John and Daniel Striped Tiger

The following is the text of a message delivered during worship by ESR student Travis Etling on September 22, 2015. 

(Daniel and Travis)

Part I.
Description of Cornville
I want to start this morning with a story.  And before I tell the story, I want to give you the context for the story – because I was paying attention in my biblical studies classes and I know that context is everything!  I also want to minimize or at least contextualize my own questionable behavior in this story. 
     The context for this story is a sheep ranch in Cornville Arizona circa 1984; which is where I grew up - from early grade school through early high school.  Let me paint a quick picture for you.  First of all, there is no corn in Cornville.  Local legend has it that the founders of the town were named Coen.  When the clerk recorded the name of the town over the phone, she assumed the Coen’s were saying “corn” with a southern accent.  This is a highly dubious explanation I know, but that’s the story.
     Cornville is in the high desert.  There are rugged mountains, scrubby trees like mesquite and juniper.  Cornville is in the Verde Valley, which means “green valley” in Spanish so it’s not your typical desert scene – no sand dunes or saguaro cacti – its actually quite green depending on the year.  There is quite a bit of surface water.  Our property was sandwiched between an irrigation ditch along the top of the ten acre pasture and the Oak Creek river which ran along the bottom of our ranch.  The pasture was actually flood irrigated - which is why there is no more water in the Western United States.  Actually the golf courses in Nevada and Phoenix probably have more to do with that.  Anyway, you have a sense of the physical landscape – rugged but also lots of room to run and play and grow gardens and raise sheep – really very idyllic. 

Friday, September 25, 2015

God’s Holy Presence

ESR student Deb Geiger shared the following message during ESR worship on September 8, 2015.
          
(A picture of the group, with Deb second from the left on the bottom row)

My name is Deb Geiger, for those of you who don’t know me. I am from Michigan where I attend the First Congregational United Church of Christ in a small farming community. We have been going on mission trips to Appalachia for the last 5 years. It has been a great pleasure and we now have many friends down there with whom we enjoy connecting year after year. We believe that prayer and time spent opening up to what God has for us on this trip, as well as working on self -awareness prior to heading off, leaves us open and tender to God’s presence. Thus we spend a lot of time preparing to leave, which we believe is crucial to the success of our trips. We pray ahead of time for who will be able to join us. As the group begins to form we ask them to pray for one another and the journey itself, as well as the people we will be working with when we get to Tennessee. This includes the Morgan Scott Project through whom we work in addition to the homes and hearts we repair. Our congregation is also praying for us as we go on this journey, then they too are part of the mission trip – we remain connected through prayer. I think that one of the reasons we particularly felt covered in God’s Holy presence this trip was the addition of my Call and Discernment class praying while we were gone.


Friday, September 11, 2015

Why Social Conditions Matter to the Pope

Below is an excerpt from an article co-authored by ESR Associate Professor of Theological Studies Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Rev. Jesse Jackson that originally appeared on The Huffington Post

We Christians tend to focus on personal piety. When dealing with others, we become legalistic and concentrate on dos and the don'ts, mostly of other people. We delight in creating 11th commandments like, "thou shall not drink nor smoke" instead of treating each of these as a medical issue, which they are.
Piety and expressions of personal holiness are important. We praise piety but piety is personal, not communal. Piety did not free the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. They had to convincingly plead genuine hardship and demand freedom before they could march out of slavery.
God is not only concerned about personal piety but with the social condition in which we find ourselves. During the prosperous kingdoms of Judah and Israel, the prophetic message to the people of Israel who had gone astray was not to increase their piety. It was a call to eschew luxury (Amos 6:4-6) do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. Indeed the prophets routinely criticized the people for putting personal piety ahead of addressing oppression and doing justice.
Jesus preached piety, but only when it was rightly connected with right behavior, as taught by the Torah. His ministry, described in the gospels, focused on the social conditions in which many people found themselves. His concern centered on people who were poor, hungry, and cast out. He sought to meet their needs and to critique the systems which ignored their needs.
We see similarities to Jesus in the latest actions of Pope Francis. He has preached changes to the discourse of Christianity by challenging the idolatry of symbols, material wealth. He has preached a concern for those in need and those who are oppressed. Many are familiar with his radical acts of compassion that are symbolic and tangible. In one striking example, the Pope washed the feet of 12 prisoners, men and women from different parts of the world on Maundy Thursday.
The Pope is not concerned about the status quo. He challenges the status quo.
In his statements and actions, Pope Francis reveals a commitment to emulate the earthly ministry of Jesus. This is particularly clear in the Pope's focus not only on the condition of humanity's inner selves, but even more so on the conditions in which so much of humanity lives.
To read more, please visit the original article here. You can find more articles from Grace at her Huffington Post archive page here

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

ESR's Steve Angell reviews "Go Set a Watchman"

A Review of
Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman (Harper Collins Publishers, 2015)
By Stephen W. Angell



Harper Lee's new book, "Go Set a Watchman" (the title is from Isaiah 21:6), is her second published novel.  Her first novel, the highly acclaimed “To Kill A Mockingbird,” was published in 1960, some fifty-five years earlier.  “Go Set a Watchman” is set in the same fictional Alabama town as its predecessor, and it presents the lives of its characters twenty years later. However, “Go Set a Watchman” was completed as a manuscript some years before “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Lee’s editor at Lippincott, Tay Hohoff, a Quaker by upbringing and education, was most impressed by the flashback scenes in “Watchman” and convinced Lee to expand them into a novel focusing on the earlier period in the characters’ lives, the result being “Mockingbird.”  There was never any discussion at the time, or indeed during Hohoff’s lifetime, of publishing “Watchman” too. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/books/the-invisible-hand-behind-harper-lees-to-kill-a-mockingbird.html?_r=0

From this historian's viewpoint, “Watchman” contains a penetrating and accurate portrait of the American South in the mid 1950s. It illuminates the important role of the Citizens' Councils (a more genteel version of the Ku Klux Klan) in the venomous segregationist backlash against the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision. It has a visceral immediacy in its portrayal of the white backlash to the Supreme Court (and to the Montgomery bus boycott of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.) that is not to be missed. Andrew Manis in "Southern Civil Religions inContext" has this to say about the Citizens' Councils: "The most extreme response of the white South [to Brown v. Board] ... was the rise and growth of the Citizens Councils. Founded in the summer of 1954 in Yazoo City, Mississippi, the Councils expanded into an areawide apparatus claiming 300,000 members. It propagated its message through a newspaper, regional television and radio shows, and large numbers of speakers..... The Citizens Councils contributed greatly to the South's growing alienation from the rest of the nation, ... [as] many Southerners came to refer to the 'government in Washington' as they would have spoken of a foreign power." (p. 24)


Monday, July 13, 2015

Reflections on Intermountain Yearly Meeting 2015

ESR student Tracy Davis of Durango Friends Meeting shares her thoughts about Intermountain Yearly Meeting's 2015 Annual Gathering in Haiku form:






Again, at Ghost Ranch

Intermountain had Meeting
joyous gathering



ESR alums
Now functioning as leaders
present together





Thursday, April 30, 2015

The Gift of Blessing

ESR Dean Jay Marshall delivered the following message during Earlham School of Religion Worship on April 29, 2015:


Many years back as I was sorting out what committed faithfulness looked like and what a call to ministry might involve, a group of charismatic Quakers were making their way around North Carolina, including the meeting where I was raised. Some good came from the affiliation, but theology, in part around the theme of blessing, ultimately caused me to seek elsewhere.
During an evening prayer session where one of the leaders was teaching about God’s love and abundance, she talked at length about how God wanted to bless us all. We had to be willing to stand on his Word and claim those blessings. Just that week, the devil had tempted her to unfaithfulness. In her recent prayers she had prayed for the new car she needed. Not just any car, but a Mercedes. (‘Cause nobody appreciates a sick ride like Jesus!) Maybe she had overdosed on Janis Joplin! That week she had seen a Mercedes that could have been hers and she was about to claim it as her own when she remembered --- she had wished for a red Mercedes, and this one was blue. Clearly this was a test of her trust in God to bless her with what she had requested.


Thursday, February 5, 2015

Sabbath Timeliness

Bethany Theological Seminary and Earlham School of Religion's Seminaries Librarian Jane Pinzino delivered the following message in ESR worship on Tuesday, February 3, 2015: 


Early one Friday evening, when I was a graduate student living in Philadelphia, I was walking home from the pub with Lana, a classmate in the program. As we strolled across the Walnut Street bridge, I was discussing in detail my views about a class in medieval paleography that Lana and were enrolled in. I was verbally processing the work of the week now done, continuing the trajectory from our Happy Hour conversation.  As daylight waned Lana became more and more quiet, apparently distracted, and finally visibly concerned.  Lana turned to me and politely asked whether we might move along more quickly, and I often remember her explanation, “The sun is going down and when it does, I put down my backpack.” I looked at her backpack and I looked at the sinking sun, and we picked up the pace.

We proceeded in silence while I digested this unexpected information about Lana’s way of life. Lana then shared with me, “And this is why I don’t normally go to Happy Hour on Friday with all our friends in the program; it’s not because I don’t want to be with all of you; it’s because I celebrate the Sabbath.” Lana rested at home from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. In  a bit confusion on that Friday, I offered to Lana that I would carry her backpack myself, but that idea was unrealistic since I was also carrying a backpack heavy with books. And in fact, Lana preferred carrying her own load, she simply wanted to reach home to put her own backpack down in her place, and begin the Sabbath celebration, lighting candles and enjoying rest at the end of the school week.  As we now walked along Walnut more briskly, Lana went on to describe how she observed the Sabbath in her home by refraining from schoolwork and spending a day that celebrated, received and reflected. Lana loved graduate school and the creative processes that she engaged in all week long through her writing, presenting, discussing, organizing, teaching; all of which she lay down every Friday evening for a full 24 hour period. My walk home with Lana that day started my own journey of claiming Sabbath rest as a vital part of a productive, industrious, full and rich life.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

An Old Testament Scholar reviews "Exodus: Gods and Kings"


Regarding the new Bible move, Exodus: Gods and Kings, all I can say is, Not only "no," but "hell no." Even as a generic fantasy movie (along the lines of Lord of the Rings) it is totally lame. As a retelling of the exodus story, it moves to horrid. As to what they got right: well there is a Pharaoh, and a Moses, and some slaves, and some plagues, and being caught between a sea and Pharaoh's army. But that's about it. It would be worth seeing only as an exercise in how to totally mangle a biblical story. It's not even their gap filling that I object to, though a lot of that was bad. It's what they left out. The aim seems to be to turn Moses into a fighting man. Here is my list of things that are wrong. It is by no means exhaustive.

The movie begins inexplicably with a battle between the Egyptians and the Hittites. Inexplicable because the major battle at Kadesh between those two armies took place during Ramesses II’s reign, not during his father’s. Plus there’s no mention of the eventual peace treaty signed between the two nations. The only point seems to be to establish both Moses and Ramesses fighting abilities and to round out one of the gap fills, an Egyptian prophecy that someone will save someone’s life, and then become king. During the battle Moses saves Ramesses. And that means what exactly?