Getting Naked(er)

By Diane Reynolds

I had the Jon Watts experience twice while he was at Earlham School of Religion, once when he was performing at the Peace forum and once when he did a program called “Clothe Yourself in Righteousness” with his friend Maggie Harrison.

Jon Watts is that rarity, a young friend, and he has created a buzz with YouTube videos. In one, a group of Quakers in a meeting at Pendle Hill get up and start dancing. In another, at Guilford College, a group of Quakers purportedly “get naked” at the end of a meeting for worship … except they don’t actually get naked (at least not in the video I saw). They get underweared.

At the Peace forum, Jon talked and performed music. He had been at Guilford College and he then went to Portugal, but didn’t like living in a city there. He would walk the streets, wondering why humans paved over nature and killed animals and created this terrible thing—the city. Then one day, as he was walking and thinking, he met someone’s eyes—and realized he was communicating hate to that person. Not good. He realized that destruction comes from the pain and brokenness we feel as a culture. How to heal ourselves?

Jon sang a song called “We Are Lovers of Our Lost Earth.”

On Tuesday evening, for “Clothe Yourself in Righteousness,” held in the Quigg worship space, Maggie took center stage, talking about early Friends who had stripped naked and run through the streets as a witness to the need of people to clothe themselves not with outward apparel but with inward righteousness.

Maggie—and Jon when he performed—connected the physical nakedness of (some) 17th century Quakers with a metaphoric stripping down of our defenses, our false selves. If the word weren’t so overused into meaninglessness, we might say the two made a plea for living authentically. Today, as in the seventeenth century, the term “nakedness” is more powerful than authenticity---blunt, unguarded, provocative, vulnerable.

I found the session Tuesday night oddly comforting. Maggie’s unvarnished presentation modeled authenticity/nakedness. I found appealing the argument that it’s OK just to be yourself. It was soothing to attend an event that didn’t really have a point except to be about being. Just being. Not even being naked, really, because that, of course is a “statement.”. You were there in Quigg, and it was OK. You didn’t have to do anything. You didn’t have to be worried about factory exploitation in Indonesia or violence in the Gaza strip. You could just sort of chill. It was therapeutic. Young people came. There were a lot of big wrinkled cottony scarves, some bare feet, many boots. If the Quigg could ever be said to have a clubby, coffee house feel, it did that evening. I kept waiting for Allen Ginsberg to stand up and start reciting “America.” Well, OK, no…

Not to change the subject, but while I like their attempts to stir the pot, it nags at me that Jon and Maggie and their friends didn’t get naked in their get naked video. It seems a tease. If you’re going to say you’re getting naked, then get naked. The integrity testimony comes into play, in terms of “possessing what you profess.” Stripping down to your underwear is … faux daring. Safe daring. (What happened to streaking?) So that bothers me. Jon talked about getting to peace through shaking things up—“coming up through the flaming sword,” as the early Quakers called it. Stripping to your modest underwear on a video is not exactly the flaming sword. Going fully naked—yes, maybe.

On the other hand, Jon and Maggie evoked a mood and created a “space” for thinking about how we live. And beyond that, I didn’t really want Jon and Maggie to get naked. I was actually relieved that they didn’t, because I didn’t know how I would react to “too much information.” And that gets back to a thought about nakedness — Tell the truth but tell it slant. Get naked, but have the light and shade beams shining through the meeting house windows so that the most private parts stays private.

So I value the message Jon and Maggie are communicating. But I wish they would tweak it a little. We may need to strip down, but how about — like Jon and Maggie -- only to our underwear? How about getting naked-er? Or at least that’s my thought—and perhaps it says more about me and Jon and Maggie holding  back from really shaking things up than anything else. Maybe, in the end, Jon and Maggie are just upholding the status quo, not really making us uncomfortable? What do you think?

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

Hospitality African Style: Can we receive it? Can we offer it?

By Diane Reynolds

ESR professor Stephanie Crumley-Effinger spoke at the Thursday Peace Forum lunch held at ESR about the warm and caring hospitality the faculty and staff of ESR received during their summer trip to Kenya and Rwanda.

The enthusiasm of the welcome was overwhelming and much appreciated, she said, and included dancing, singing, speeches of greeting, and feasting.

For Stephanie and other Quakers in the United States, our characteristic location vis-à-vis our African brothers and sister is often that of giver. For her and others, it was strange to be in the dependent position.

The disparity in material wealth—and hence power-- was always present in interactions with East Africans, she said, if not always acknowledged. Added to that was a cultural difference: Kenyans and Rwandans attach no stigma to asking for money. For middle-class Americans, this is a cultural taboo and such requests can be unsettling. However, for East Africans, receiving a gift—or giving one—is a form of bonding.

For Stephanie, accepting hospitality freely and gratefully became an act of mutuality that started to dismantle the hierarchy of giver and receiver. If we can learn to both give and receive, and not to do one to the exclusion of the other, we have learned hospitality. Such hospitality is at the core of building relationships and making us all more human.

As I ponder giving and receiving, I think about how uneven hospitality can be in the United States, a function, I believe, of our wealth. Hospitality often seems optional: We tend to assume that people can afford their own food and lodging, and that such food and lodging is readily available. Sometimes, for bigger parties or events, hosts will send lists of hotel or inns where guests can stay. The assumption is that people will understand that the hosts can’t accommodate 25, 50 or 75 people and that the guests can easily afford to pay for a hotel. People may not attend, however, because they are embarrassed at not being able to afford lodging and this becomes part of the invisibility want can cause. On the other hand, we often feel more comfortable as hotel guests than houseguests, because the obligation of staying in a hotel ends with paying the bill.

As the downturn in the economy continues, people are turning more to each other for hospitality. I know I am personally more conscious of needing to be frugal these days and am grateful to be offered hospitality.

Hospitality enacts the Christian—and more broadly, spiritual—witness of a free and joyful offering of abundant life. It requires risk-taking in which we put ourselves into the vulnerable position of reliance on the other—and risk-taking too on the part of the host. Yet when offered, as it often is, with great generosity, it can help build what Walter Brueggermann calls the shalom community, a place in which we want to share because others have shared with us. It is a start toward building the Kingdom of God on earth.

While Stephanie was speaking of the wealth disparities between Americans and East Africans, I thought too about the disparities in our own country. These, of course, are in the news as people protest the 1% having so much of the pie we have all worked to bake. Do the top 1% feel awkward around the rest of us? Could we offer them radical hospitality, inviting them into our homes and lives and treating them with warmth and joy?

I am grateful to brothers and sisters in Kenya and Rwanda, who know want, and thus know the value of abundant hospitality, and can model for us how to offer this gift.

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Quakers and the limits of pacifism

Bonhoeffer, a German theologian executed by the Nazis, poses a challenge to Quakers. Although a pacifist, Bonhoeffer supported assassinating Hitler. Meanwhile, German Quakers made a strategic decision to fight in World War II in order to survive as a group. The alternative to military service was execution as a traitor (ie, the Nazis didn’t recognize CO status). Bonhoeffer and the German Quakers raise a question: In extreme situations, how far can the peace testimony bend? Can personal purity or holiness become immoral? Were pacifist Germans wrong to participate in violence?

Learn more at Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Sneak Preview, a review by Diane Reynolds.

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

Following the Call

By Diane Reynolds

For 18 years John Muhanji worked as a banker in Kenya, living a high-status life of material prosperity. In 2004, moved by the plight of survivors of the Rwandan genocide, he resigned from the bank to take a much lower-paying job with Friends United Meeting. “It was a moment of total change,” he said at last Thursday’s Peace Forum lunch at Earlham School of Religion.

This is a rare, but not unknown story—among others, John Woolman deliberately curtailed his tailoring business to free himself for ministry, George Fox chose a life involving years in jail, and Elizabeth Fry stepped into prison reform ministry. The call comes and some heed it.

The son of Quaker minister, Muhanji is participating in the rapid growth of Quakerism in both Kenya and Rwanda, a growth he attributes to the faith’s ability to provide a distinctive Christian voice. To continue to expand, Quakerism, he said, must maintain that distinctive edge and not become just another religious choice.

The Quaker distinctives Muhanji locate as important include the integrity and peace testimonies. As Kenyan Quakers stand for integrity, they not only talk about the faith but live in a way that shows the difference a Quaker version of Christianity can make in people’s lives. This, says Muhanji, is a powerful witness to Christianity as a force for good in the world. Most specifically, Quakers exemplify the connection between Christian faith and peace.

Quakers run 250 high schools in Kenya, Muhanji said, and these schools teach peace building and reconciliation skills, making them vitally important for changing the culture of government and police corruption that exists in Kenya. Students are hungry for this peace building knowledge. And creating a cadre of peacemakers, Muhanji said, is vital not only for Kenya, which in 2007 experienced an outbreak of unspeakable violence, but in the entire region of East Africa. Somalia is a special problem, Muhanji said, for terrorist training goes on here unchallenged, threatening the region.

Muhanji invited Quakers and others to come to Kenya to teach in the Quaker schools. Our knowledge and peace skills are needed there, he said. For those with the call, it seems that little could be more gratifying than entering a country where your life has the potential to make an immediate and a lasting difference.

I think often about Kenya because I have a friend who lived there for seven years: she and her family lived in a gated community with a private security guard, a maid, a driver, private schooling and all the privileges of the good life that American ex-patriots can enjoy. They also lived in a society in which they had to be on constant guard against theft, a country filled with desperately poor people, and with an infrastructure so overburdened that people without money were left to die on hospital emergency room floors.

When John talks about the hope of Quakerism, he is saying, I think, the same as Dorothy Day, who often spoke of building a world in which “it is easier to be good.” Nobody, I believe, wants to let a fellow human die on a hospital floor. Nobody wants to steal to stay alive.

The dialogue and partnership between U.S. and Kenyan Quakers is vital to both sides. Our society, as recent cheers for letting the uninsured die show, is threatened with hardness of heart. We need to share the vitality of Kenyan Quakers. What more can we do to promote the lived—not merely sentimental--tenderness that has long been a central tenet of our tradition? How can we rally more around our insight into Jesus Christ as a radical peacemaker rather than fight among ourselves?

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

A Paradigm Shift from “Just War” to “Just Peace” at the World Council of Churches

By Diane Reynolds

Is “Just War” theory—which attempts to limit when and how a nation wages war- obsolete? At a recent meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, 1,000 members of the World Council of Churches—including Bethany Seminary professor Scot Holland—moved beyond it to embrace a vision of “Just Peace.”

Speaking at last Thursday’s Peace Forum lunch, held at ESR, Holland explained the importance of a new, more creative, way of imagining a world without war.

The shift towards peace has been long coming, Holland said. Shortly after World War II, the WCC invited historic peace churches, including Quakers, Brethren and Mennonites to Geneva, where the WCC decided that “war is contrary to the will of God.” However, at the time, churches were not yet able to work out what that statement meant in political or pragmatic terms.

Fast forwarding to the last ten years—dubbed by the WCC the “decade to overcome violence”—“Just War” theory became highly questionable, Holland said.

“Just Peace,” Holland said, is preferable because it moves us from a military metaphysics to a “poetry of peace.” Because we are used to “the bad fiction” of a master narrative of war, we equate guns with security, and worry if we don’t have strong militaries. The move away from this mindset, Holland said, is pragmatic,
because military metaphysics “simply doesn’t work.” Instead, a new story approach finds power in the human longing for a peace narrative.

Thus, the poetic or creative basis of “Just Peace” encourages us to imagine not just avoiding war but peaceful modes of being in the world. These include embracing an embodied spirituality that names the human form as a temple. If the spiritual is found only beyond the body, Holland said, anything can be done to the body.

The World Council of Churches enumerated four principles of Just Peacemaking:

o Building peace in our communities, including our spiritual communities, with an emphasis on our faith groups being “in the world, for the world.”

o Embracing eco-theological approaches to making peace with the planet.

o Promoting peace in the marketplace and acknowledging that economic injustice makes peace difficult.

o Focusing on peace between peoples by building “the peace of the city”—promoting outer peace in the world and trusting it to lead to inner peace. This form of peace was imagined by the prophet Jeremiah, who called for the Israelites to build houses and live in them, to plant gardens and eat of them, to marry and have children.

Personally, I love the idea of working together to build a just peace on earth, rather than merely sidestepping war until it becomes “inevitable.” However, many Quakers tend to believe that inner peace is a necessary first step to outer peace. What do you think of an external “peace of the city” leading to inner harmony?
Further, what do you think of “Just Peace?” Can a new paradigm lead to a more peaceful world?

More on “Just Peace” can be found at http://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/general-secretary/speeches/just-peace-the-dream-that-comes-true.html

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’sMaster of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog,Emerging Quaker.

Acting for Peace, Resisting the War Tax

By Diane Reynolds
The United States can lead the way to putting an end to wars, said Quaker activist Steve Olshewsky at a recent Peace Forum, held at ESR.
Olshewsky is a person who acts on his convictions. When he realized, years ago, as a public  accountant, how much of the average taxpayer’s earnings—about half our tax dollars-- funds warfare, he sprang into action. Since then, he has made it his life’s work to push for passage of the Peace Tax Fund Act.
This act, (HR 1191) would allow a person who was registered as a conscientious objector to have his or her war taxes put into a special fund that would be used for other government expenses. Nobody would escape paying taxes, but nobody with religious objections to war would be forced to financially support defense activities that violated their consciences. Olshewsky believes that if the U.S. would establish such a fund, it would set a worldwide standard that other countries would follow.
Olshewsky’s message-- Don’t be discouraged, do speak truth to power, change can happen--can be hard to listen in hard times, but it’s worth hearing. Olshewsky spoke to the difference ordinary citizens have made in recent history, as when Rep. Barney Frank signed on as a co-sponsor to the Peace Tax Fund bill because of letters from Friends.
At the forum, Olshewsky gave out brightly colored construction paper and pens and asked all who were so moved to write letters to Congress for sponsorship of HR 1191. Olshewsky, who said he visits every member of Congress at least once a year, promised to hand deliver the letters.
I found the “I want to believe” side of my soul stirred by Olshewsky’s enthusiasm and conviction. Can an average person circulating through the halls of Congress—a mere drop in the bucket among 300 million citizens—make a difference? Olshewsky answers with a loud yes. “No witness for conscience is ever lost,” he says. “Your voice is so powerful.” As I think back to the kind of changes early Quakers made—ensuring a degree of religious freedom, founding colonies, freeing slaves—I think, yes, perhaps we too can enact change in our times.
But the disconnect is often between the desire for change and knowing what more we can do, here and now, amid busy schedules.  The challenge is for Quaker organizations to meet volunteers where they are. Where and how can we use our energy to help in concrete ways to usher in a more peaceful world?

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

Joerg Reiger: Challenging Empire

By Diane Reynolds
How can Christianity challenge Empire? Joerg Rieger, professor of theology at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, author of several books, including Christ and Empire and No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics and the Future, asked that question when he came to ESR last week as the seminary’s Wilson lecturer.
Empire concentrates power and wealth in the hands of a few, Rieger said, and works to convince the people under its rule that it represents the only viable way to live. Military might supports and enforces this empire vision. The U.S. is an empire today, Reiger said, as the Roman Empire once was. In both cases, Christianity threatens to undermine Empire’s totalizing tendencies.
Empire has long tried to domesticate and dilute the Christian message, but has never been able to do so entirely. The alternative Christian vision flourishes at the bottom of society and works its way up. It can be found not in Empire promises of future benefits, but in the here and now—where the sick are healed, the blind see and the lame walk. It offers a shalom vision that challenges a top-down, all-powerful Empire.
Much of what Rieger said accords with Quakerism, which has traditionally spoken truth to power and aligned itself with the marginalized. Quakerism roots itself in an understanding of Christianity that opposes Empire’s hierarchy, oppression and material pomp.
Rieger explicitly linked Christianity to economics and politics. As I listened to him, I found myself agreeing - and wishing an alternative voice would debate him. Where do progressive notions go awry? Where can they be critiqued? In an era, unprecedented in my lifetime, in which the social contract appears to be in process of being fundamentally renegotiated, where do we find new ideas? When Reiger, for instance, was asked what could be done about “permanently disappeared” jobs, his answer was a government jobs program. However, in this political climate, the government doesn’t seem inclined to create jobs.  What do we do instead of looking to the government?
In a blog on the high tuition of a Quaker school in New York City, Bob Doto described a punk mentality, where, instead of fighting with the system, we find spaces where we can live with integrity. I’d love ESR to invite Rieger back, along with a punk theologian, and a conservative theologian, to debate each other and spark some perhaps heated conversation. After all, as the early Quakers knew, Jesus came not to support the status quo, be it progressive or conservative, but to light the world on fire.

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

Localize: Your Vote Counts

By Diane Reynolds
When one side of an argument speaks louder than the other side, local governments and develop skewed policies that are not based on the wishes of the majority of their electorate.  It's no mystery that elements of hate and intolerance in our society have advanced their agenda through grassroots organizing.  Progressive people can do the same, said Allan Kauffman, mayor of Goshen, Indiana and father of a Bethany Seminary student at this week’s Peace Forum lunch held at ESR.
Nine votes or fewer can decide who is elected to a town or city council, and one council member can change the whole political balance of a town, Kauffman said, encouraging listeners to become civically engaged at the most local level of government. “Local issues count,” he said.
In Goshen, said Kauffman, a member of the Church of the Brethren, most of the city council now comes from historic peace churches, primarily the Mennonites, changing the tenor of government business practices. Now, the council puts more emphasis on consensus, and is less likely to support an item that passes on a divided vote, such as 4 to 3, knowing that such narrow margins lead to divisiveness, not unity. The desire for consensus also leads to more creative problem-solving, he said.
Even when their ideas are defeated, having progressives on the council has brought good to the city, Kauffman said. The council was able to create a Human Relations Commission (HRC) in response to an influx of Latino immigrants into Goshen, who came seeking some of the many blue collar jobs there. When the Ku Klux Klan, which has historic ties to Goshen, marched in the city, the commission organized a fundraising drive for the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization loathed by the Klan. As long as the Klan stayed in town, the fundraiser continued, which encouraged the Klan to leave. Later, the city passed an ordinance that supported free speech but required that the speaker be unmasked.  Although the ACLU contested this law in court and won—the Constitution protects anonymous speech—Kauffman felt the project was success because it brought ordinary citizens into local government action. Similarly, when the HRC proposed the city adopt language to protect gays and lesbians, outside pressure defeated the measure—but civic engagement increased.
Since the 18th century, Quakers have had an ambivalent relationship with governments, both withdrawing from and engaging in political action. Clearly, from a religious viewpoint, political engagement must be Spirit-led, raising the question of what exactly a Spirit-led politics look like? Yet with the U.S. economy shaky and politics growing more extreme, Kauffman makes a strong case for progressive people of faith to engage in the process of discerning where and when to get involved, even at the most local level.
Questions that cross my mind are these: Are Quakers hampered by “old wineskins,” sometimes hanging on to cherished notions from the 1960s that have become outdated? What are some new ways that Quakers could get more creatively involved local politics? What impedes our civic engagement?

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

Spirituality Gathering: “Leaps and Bounds: Faith, Ecology and the Global Economy”

By Diane Reynolds
Artist and activist Tevyn East used modern dance, song, movement and story-telling to embody earth care as the keynote performer at Saturday’s Spirituality Gathering. East, a member of the Church of the Savior and the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, appeared joyous and sometimes radiant as she absorbed herself into an hour of using her body and voice to express sorrow, wonder and hope over the fate of the earth. Borrowing words and images from Torah, Jesus, and peace advocates such as Ghandi, East encouraged her audience to care for creation as a creative and spiritual practice.
After her performance, East invited onlookers to share practical issues that block their paths to living more simply.  Answers included not wanting to give up privacy to share space to not knowing who could most benefit from produce from our gardens.
In the afternoon, following lunch, a varied program of workshops included spiritual dancing, taizé, understanding place, communicating about eco-spirituality, yoga, midrash journaling and a nature walk. In a session on economic discipleship, Roland Kreager and Cindi Goslee of Right Sharing of World Resources, led participants in exploring how those in the “developed” world can better practice the self-reliance, sustainability and mutual support and accountability that we often ask of our Third World partners.
Themes that emerged from the gathering included the role of art and imagination in supporting our connectedness to the earth. In her keynote, for instance, Tevyn evoked oneness with creation with a poetic image of humans “eating the sun” when consuming plants that are nourished by light. Also woven through the day was the theme of simple, local steps as beginning answers to global environmental problems.
Many prospective ESR students who attended an open house at the seminary on Friday stayed for the Saturday gathering, getting them a taste of how the school reaches beyond the conventional classroom to offer a creative and embodied education. ESR students, including Pat Thomas, Linnea Stiffler, Dagmar Bollinger, Dave Wunker, Emma Churchman, alumna Summer Cushman, and yes, me, Diane Reynolds, led workshops, an affirmation of the school’s emphasis on developing leadership. But most of all, we enjoyed a day of spiritual exploration of body, mind and heart.
I was impressed by the loving and optimistic  tone of the gathering. While creation care is an urgent concern, leaders and participants focused on spiritual  responses to the crisis, not stridency, recognizing that inner healing is a first step towards healing the planet.
A query: As Quakers, situated wherever we are, what are some steps we can take right now toward greater harmony with our environment? How can art and imagination help that process?

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

Serving the Poor in Richmond, Indiana

By Diane Reynolds
The poor may be with us always… but we can help.
At ESR’s common meal last Tuesday, students, staff and visitors heard Sharlene George, Laura Arendt and a few others from Open Arms Ministry in Richmond speak of the growing number of working poor and newly poor in the Richmond area—and the efforts Open Arms is making to serve both the freshly minted poor and the entrenched generational underclass.
Sharlene George, the executive director of Open Arms, said that the organization is seeing more people than ever who are seeking aid for the first time. People in this situation are often embarrassed. Some are angry that although they are working very hard, they can no longer earn enough to make ends meet. Open Arms works with these clients to focus on what they can be grateful for as they adjust to the reality of poverty.
Beyond financial aid, the organization offers budgeting help and offers itself as on-going spiritual and community support system that clients can call on for prayer, for referrals as other needs arise and for caring attention to them as human beings. One man, for example, who was just out of prison, came in for help paying for a prescription drug. When he mentioned that he was going on a job interview, Open Arms noticed he might need a hair trim and connected him with a beautician who offers free hair cuts to people in need. Another time, while talking to a woman with young children who came in for help, Open Arms realized that, beyond her immediate problem, this mother had no money for Christmas.  They took the initiative to recommend her to a group wanting to sponsor a family’s Christmas. 
Open Arms, which began in 2009 after several years of planning, is a partnership of a dozen faith groups in the Richmond area that pool resources to assist to people in need.   The ministry, which dispensed $11,000 in funds last year, offers financial help of up to $250 per needy family every six months. It works to meet people’s need by partnering with other agencies: $100 pooled from several different groups each donating $25 can make it possible to pay a bill.
They say the hardest clients to deal with can be the generational poor,  because they are used to living on the social services system, and thus can sometimes appear to be demanding.  The staff pray daily to keep an unbiased attitude and open heart toward this population, who have deep and real needs.
As I listened to the story of Open Arms, I found myself remembering Jesus’ comment that “the poor will be with us always.” This statement occurred to me as I was pondering how we could structure a system that wouldn’t enable people to skate along in poverty but would encourage them towards independence and fuller life. Then I realized, that as it was impossible to engineer the Tower of Babel, so it’s impossible to structure a perfect human system, much as we might long for a shalom world where God’s abundance is distributed such that every person has enough.  So for the people who are left at the bottom, scraping along to survive inadequately, we need to offer help and compassion, not condemnation.  As seminary students, sometimes caught up in the intellectual realms, it’s also good to have a stream of reminders from places like Open Arms of faith in practice and of missional opportunities in our own community and around the world.
Open Arms is also aware of the fine line it walks between counseling people to adjust to straitened circumstances and the issue of addressing structural problems that are causing an upsurge in poverty. While an attitude of gratitude is helpful, acquiescing to a new normal in which poverty is acceptable is counterproductive.  In addition to giving or receiving charity, people need to be talking to Washington.
Ministries like Open Arms that address the whole person, spiritual and emotional as well as financial, fill an important and urgent social role. George noted that when poor people, who could be any of us, receive dignity and respect, they are more likely to give back to the system that helped them. She said that the woman whose family received Christmas gifts “paid it forward” by leaving a bread maker on the Open Arms doorstep, hoping it could be used by someone else in need.
Open Arms can use both monetary donations and volunteers. They can be contacted via their website, and they are always open to phone calls or visitors.

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

White Christians, Racism and Quakers

by Diane Reynolds
At Thursday’s weekly Peace Forum, held at ESR, Bethany Seminary alumnus Dean J. Johnson discussed religious narratives among white Christians that uphold white power and privilege. Johnson, now an assistant professor of religious studies at Defiance College in Ohio, interviewed 20 Christians across 12 faith traditions in Fort Wayne, Ind., to discover how being white impacted their theology.
Johnson found that most whites unwittingly aid oppression by misunderstanding how privilege works, perceiving themselves foremost as individuals rather than as part of a powerful group. This perception leads to a cultural narrative of merit, in which many whites believe they have succeeded based solely on their own skills and efforts.
Other attitudes that uphold oppression include an unwillingness to accept racial equality when it comes with a loss of white privilege, and perceiving white cultural norms as “common sense,” thus denigrating the perceptions of other races. Many whites also maintain that our society is colorblind or post-racial while at the same time expressing an acute personal awareness of race. One woman, for example, claimed that she was racially colorblind but then opined that her daughter probably dated black men because she felt she was not pretty enough to attract white men.
White cultural narratives seep into the white Christian narrative. Some white churches communicate a narrative of just deserts, in which God rewards the deserving (ie, whites), a story reinforced in many churches by the absence of any conversation about the larger social issues that might impede minority achievement. Many whites emphasize accepting Christian salvation rather than living a Christ-like life: they assent to a Christian narrative or creed rather than changing how they live. Many then conflate good feelings towards other races with enlightened racial behavior: If my racial intentions are good, my behavior can do no harm.  Churches, as well, reinforce white paternalism by expecting non-whites to assimilate to their cultural norms, often with little interest in learning about the patterns and behaviors of other groups.
Blacks, in contrast, are likely to see race or larger social forces as significant influences on their achievement and to be distrustful of white efforts to reach out to them as driven by white needs and agendas. Blacks tend to focus on the outcomes of white behavior - are whites acting in non-racist ways? - rather than on white “feelings” about other races that might be contradicted by actions.
As the 2008 book Fit for Freedom, not for Friendship shows, Quakers are not immune to the insidious racism that plagues other predominately white religious groups. For all our good work on abolition, we white Quakers, along with the rest of white society, have been slow to embrace blacks as equals. We wish to worship with blacks, but on our terms. We want to “help” blacks, but this desires often carries with it the assumption that “they” will assimilate to white cultural norms. We are often blind to our own racist assumptions, embracing the narrative that good intentions absolve of us of the ability to do harm.
Johnson offered a list of suggestions for white people and congregations wishing to revise their racial worldviews.  For individuals, Johnson advises that whites become more conscious of their own privilege; learn the history of the US and Europe from the vantage point of the oppressed; refuse to let guilt lead to inaction; listen; raise concerns about oppression; and confront white cultural and religious narratives. Further, individuals can use religious language to express how racially sensitive narratives align with Christ-like beliefs.
For congregations, Johnson suggests the following five practices: becoming intentionally and radically inclusive by examining who is absent from the faith community and being willing to change to become more hospitable; developing real and lasting, rather than superficial, relationships with groups facing oppression; visiting other faith traditions to enhance understanding of their cultures; bringing in speakers from other traditions; and developing and posting statements of inclusion that reassure people outside the white community that they are welcome.
Now that some of the furor over Fit for Freedom has died down, to what extent do you find Quaker meetings and churches are examining their racial composition and practices? Given the largely white composition of most North American Quaker meetings and churches, how can we become more welcoming?  Is it more important to maintain the Eurocentric roots of our tradition than to become inclusive? Or is our tradition an attachment that impedes our ability to be a light to the world?  Do we display arrogance or are our traditional practices valuable enough for us to resist change?
Are there ways we can hold on to core practices and yet become genuinely open to people of other races and classes? I am trying to sidestep the issue of Christ as I recognize that not all North American Quakers are Christian, but to me the question comes down to this: Do our practices reflect a fundamental expression of Christianity or the values of Christ that we should not compromise? If so, what practices are important to maintain, and how do we do so while at the same time extending a Christ-like welcome to all people?

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

Quakers and the Postmodern Condition: “The Spirit Of Truth Among Friends”

Could it be that we Quakers are behind the times in how we understand truth?
Jeff Dudiak, Quaker and Associate Professors of Philosophy at King’s College in Edmonton, asked that question when he spoke last Thursday at ESR about Quakerism and the postmodern condition.
According to Dudiak, we Quakers suffer our current bitter divisions because we misconceive what truth is. Our problem, as in the wider culture, is adherence to a “withering modernism.”
Quakers of whatever stripe, be it evangelical or liberal, Dudiak says, view the world through an Enlightenment lens, believing that we can stand back and “detach” from the world, observe it and draw conclusions that will lead to truth.  The individual is the knowing subject. The world is her object. This subject/object split is at the heart of the Enlightenment thinking that grips our society. Each of us thus erects a “buffered self” that observes the world from on high, as if we are not part of the world. It’s characteristic of our age, Dudiak says, that we stand back and view the world “as a picture.”
Two strands emerge from this Enlightenment worldview. Orthodox Friends believe they extract truth objectively or empirically, through Scripture and other historic witness or revelation. Liberal Friends, following the Romantic strain of modern thinking, believe they can find the truth within, through subjective personal experience or feeling. The commonality that links both groups is the belief in the power of the individual to reason or feel his or her way to truth.
Dudiak illustrates how each group understands George Fox’s revelation that “there is one, Jesus Christ who can speak to my condition.” The Orthodox  Quaker relies on the objective truth “out there” of Jesus Christ as validating Fox’s vision. Jesus Christ spoke to Fox’s condition because Jesus Christ is Truth. The Liberals, however, focus on the “my” condition in Fox’s statement, the subjective experience of truth that the individual can possess and that does not need to be verified because it is “true for her.”
Postmodernism questions this Enlightenment way of understanding. It’s impossible for a human being living in the world to stand objectively or subjectively “outside” that world as a neutral observer. Quaker truth, says Dudiak, is richer and thicker than what the Enlightenment has led us to believe.
Dudiak  speaks to a larger “spiritual” truth that is, in the Hebrew sense of the word Spirit, the breath that  brings life to nature and nature to life. This Spirit or Truth is nothing in itself but is that which animates every living thing. This truth has little to do with either facts or feelings. To be aligned with this Spirit (Truth) is to be truly alive and alight.
Thus, to live in Quaker truth is not to engage in the impossible project of discerning the objective reality about religion or to live in the realm of “what I personally believe” but to participate in an on-going objective process of creation that both precedes us and will follow us. 
Dudiak finds it heartbreaking that Quakers parrot the larger culture in their understanding of truth. He paints an alternative picture of truth as dynamic and relational. Truth means developing a conception of God that leads not to static fact but to life. Truth is troth—Quakers agreeing to be faithful one to another. Quakers can find unity around troth, which transcends the need for agreement. Dudiak sees marriage as the model for this Quaker unity. Partners in a marriage don’t expect to always agree, but do pledge to stay faithful and to love one another despite their disagreements. “In marriage,” he says, “the test of unity is not agreement, but hanging in there.”
Should Quaker unity be based on the ability to live in loving community with others, not ignoring disagreement but at the same time not making agreement the ground of unity? Dudiak also noted that Convergent Friends may be on this postmodern path already, choosing to ignore the disagreements that are ripping through Quakerism. Do you agree with this?

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.