Encountering Our Divisions –Young Adult Friends Gathering Video Series

By Micah Bales

This video is the fourth in a series put together from footage and interviews taken during the 2010 Young Adult Friends Gathering in Wichita, Kansas. This gathering took place over the 2010 Memorial Day Weekend and was perhaps the most diverse and balanced YAF gathering in generations. Roughly equal numbers of Liberal-Unprogrammed, Pastoral and Evangelical Friends were in attendance, along with a small number of Conservative Friends.

In this segment, we hear from several YAFs about their experience of how divisions came to the surface at the Gathering’s Saturday-morning Bible study. During this time, Friends wrestled in particular with our different understandings of the role and centrality of Jesus Christ in our faith as Friends.

For more information about the 2010 YAF Gathering, please check out the official website, which features the advance materials that Friends were asked to use in their preparation for the conference, as well as the epistle that those gathered issued at the end of the weekend.

Micah Bales serves as Coordinator of Young Adult Engagement at ESR. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Faith Kelley. He is active with Capitol Hill Friends and is a member of Rockingham Friends Meeting, Ohio Yearly Meeting.

Report on Cuba Yearly Meeting February-March, 2011

By Steve Angell

Heredios Santos, long-time pastor in Cuba Yearly Meeting, first mentioned the possibility of my going to Cuba in 2001. In 2008, there was an important informal meeting of Friends interested in Cuba at the meeting of the Section of the Americas of FWCC in Jackson County, Indiana. I was among those present. Maria Yi Reyna, pastor of the church in Holguin, Cuba, mentioned that the great need of the Cuba Yearly Meeting from Friends in the Americas was for resources to bolster their Quaker identity. A number of us sitting around the table were excited by this. Led by Kristen Richardson, the American Friends Service Committee sent a “Traveling Seminary” to Cuba Yearly Meeting in February of this year, with their Brazil rep, Jorge Lafitte, offering valuable workshops to Cuban Friends on non-violent conflict resolution and social change theory.

Meanwhile, Jay Marshall was in contact with the Clerk of Cuba Yearly Meeting, Ramon Gonzalez Longoria Escalona, and arranged a visit to the Yearly Meeting for me this February and March. I was invited to give a series of lectures at the Yearly Meeting sessions themselves, and afterwards a lecture at the Young Adult Friends Retreat and three workshops at the newer monthly meetings in Cuba.

A few observations about the background of Friends’ ministry in Cuba

I arrived in Holguin, Cuba, one of the larger cities in Cuba, at the eastern end of the island, on February 21. The following day, along with three representatives of New England Yearly Meeting, Benigno Sanchez-Eppler, Victoria Rhoden, and Noah Baker-Merrill, I traveled the thirteen kilometers to Gibara, where the yearly meeting was to be held. Gibara is a small town of about 30,000 people on the coast. Hurricane Ike caused major damage in 2008, destroying much of the seawall. There has not been any money to repair the damage to the seawall. Friends in Gibara sheltered dozens of people in their church during the hurricane. Fortunately, there was very little damage to the church itself. They lost only a small portion of their roof. Also fortunately, Cubans were well prepared for the hurricane, and on the whole island, only two people lost their lives.

In the day before the Yearly Meeting sessions started, Benigno, a native of Cuba who emigrated to the United States at age 13, tried to orient us to the realities we would see around us. He emphasized that the orientation was coming through a particular lens – that is, his. The Cuban Revolution has emphasized human equality, but unfortunately, it has ended up with a process of equal immiseration, that is, everyone becoming equally poor. The Cuban government is the single employer. All property, including church property, belongs to the Cuban government – the Cuban government allows churches to use certain property, families to live in certain houses, and so forth, but all land belongs to the government. Industry and wages are at a very low level. Monthly wages of $15 to $25 are fairly usual for Cubans. It is not a living wage.

The Cuban revolution, Benigno said, was built on five pillars: Schools; Medical Centers; the Military; Prisons; and Emigration. So Cuba has a relatively high degree of educational attainment. It has an extraordinary high degree of doctors per capita. However, there are few jobs for those who finish schools. Doctors are paid very low salaries. Medical consultations are free, but medicines are very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, even over-the-counter medicines such as pain relievers. In the stores, there is virtually nothing for sale. There are, for example, no cars for sale; the few cars that one sees on the roads are 1950s American vehicles, often lovingly and painstakingly maintained, or later era Soviet cars, but none of recent vintage. The Cuban monetary system is very difficult to figure out; the Yearly Meeting treasurers keeps accounts in three currencies, the regular Cuban peso, the convertible Cuban peso, and United States dollars. An international like myself can carry the convertible peso, but is not allowed to carry regular pesos. (The informal exchange rates for those two currencies are remarkably different.)

With the military and prisons, there is a high degree of state control. There is virtually no place for open expression of political dissent. One of the complicating factors for gathering people for the Yearly Meeting sessions was that in one of the cities where there is a Friends Church, Banes, Mothers in White, a group of Mothers for political prisoners, was gathering for a protest. So the Yearly Meeting bus (the Wawa) would have to penetrate intense presence of security forces in order to bring Friends from Banes to the Yearly Meeting sessions.

It is hard to walk very far on the streets of Gibara (something that I did every day) without having someone approach you to ask for money (often quite desperately). During the time that I was there, I talked with two men, one younger and one older, who had received permission to emigrate to the United States. If a resident of Gibara receives remittances from someone working in the United States, they will be much better off than the ordinary Gibaran. One day, the three New England Friends, a Cuban Friend, and myself were walking through the streets of Gibara. The Cuban Friend explained how every house we saw with a fresh coat of paint was someone who had a spouse living abroad who sent remittances. Remittances are the second most important source of income for the island of Cuba (the most important source is tourism, all those happy Canadians that I flew down to Cuba with, and also back to Canada with.)

Getting news in Cuba is a challenge. There is no internet, and only very limited television and newspaper news coverage. Ramon, in Gibara, had to work hard to have a periodical delivered to him, and finally settled on a weekly (the Juventud). The big city Friends’ Church (Holguin) was able to have a daily delivered, the Granma. Unlike Iran, there is no English language news service – it is also in Spanish.

Yearly Meeting Sessions

It was a wonderful group of Cubans who gathered for Yearly Meeting. My lectures covered different areas of Quaker doctrine: the true nature of Quaker Community; Quakers and holiness; The Holy Spirit and Revelation; the Light of Christ; and Quakers and the testimonies. For the first two lectures, I read them from manuscript; the last three were spoken from the silence. I spoke in English, and Benigno translated for me.

The Yearly Meeting sessions were very lively. They completed an extraordinary amount of business. The list of the Action Minutes from the Yearly Meeting comes to 57 Minutes, and when printed out, they cover four pages, single spaced. The clerk does a lot of talking there, but Yearly Meeting members are not shy to express themselves when the Spirit leads. The items that led to the most extensive discussion were the Nominating Committee Report and the proposal to build a meeting house for the Programmed Meeting in Havana. In Havana, the programmed  Friends meet in a space they rent from the Episcopal Church, and the latter has not always been hospitable. The Havana Friends proposed to throw a slab on top of the house of an existing member, but there were various problems with that, most notably, that Cuban law would not allow any deeding of the nascent meeting house to Friends until the slab is actually completed, at the cost of $10,000. After considerable discussion, the Yearly Meeting approved a very diplomatically worded minute postponing any further consideration of the Havana Friends proposal, until after the change of the property laws expected from the Government in April. The Clerk, Ramon, tells me that he thinks the problem with the Episcopal Church is mostly at the local level, and that involving the Episcopal Bishop for Cuba may be able to resolve the problems between Havana Friends and the local Episcopal Church.

Another issue was starting up a Center for Quaker and Peace Studies, to supplement what theological education is available elsewhere in Cuba. More on that later.

The Friends’ Church in Puerto Padre desperately needs repair work. The school was confiscated at the time of the Cuban Revolution and is now in great disrepair, missing some (or most?) of its roof. Cuban Friends are trying to reclaim the school, and also need to find their title (or claim of title: legalities in respect to property questions are very complex)  to the Church property in order for repair work proceeds.

My first three lectures went well, but when my fourth lecture was scheduled, for Saturday night, I was suffering from severe intestinal distress. I felt that I could attend and also that I could say something, but I did not feel up to speaking for the entire hour. I did speak for five minutes at the beginning out of the silence, but then I sat down and ceded the floor. The Holy Spirit was in charge, and it worked out well; several Friends, Cuban and North American, spoke out of the silence. Noah Baker-Merrill, a gifted minister from Vermont, spoke movingly about his experience with the Light. By the time of my concluding lecture on the Testimonies the next day, I had recovered and that also went well. That afternoon, busload after busload of Friends left the Yearly Meeting compound in Gibara. New England Friend Victoria Rhoden commented that, “four days ago, I did not even know these dear Friends, but now I find myself crying as they are leaving.” It was indeed a very poignant moment.

Workshops that I offered after Yearly Meeting Sessions

The next day, Monday, Feb. 28, was the occasion for an outing on the beach, with the clerk of the yearly meeting and his family, and all four of us from the United States. The following day, I bid adieu to the New England Friends. My first workshop was in a smaller church in Holguin, by the name of Vista Alegre. I presented a session on the Testimony of Simplicity, and then my full presentation on the Light of Christ, contrasting the views of George Fox, J. J. Gurney, and Rufus Jones.

Then it was back to Gibara. That weekend the Young Adult Friends were gathering for a retreat. In many ways the Young Adult Friends are the backbone of the Yearly Meeting. There are nine monthly meetings in Cuba. The Clerk (Presidente) of Cuba Yearly Meeting, Ramon Longoria, is the pastor of the monthly meeting in Gibara. Most of the other monthly meetings are pastored either by a Young Adult Friend, or by someone who is only a few years removed from Young Adult Friends status (the upper age limit, there as here, is 35 years old). So, when I talked to the Young Adult Friends at their first session on Friday night, Mar. 4, I soon realized that I was talking to the emerging leadership of the Yearly Meeting. One thing that Cuba Yearly Meeting is asking for when they say they need help with issues of Quaker identity, is help with the spiritual formation of these Young Adult Friends who have stepped up into greatly needed positions of leadership in the Monthly Meetings.

I had been told that Young Adult Friends were very much concerned about issues of the Second Coming, so my talk on “the essentials of Quakerism” focused somewhat on the realized eschatology of early Quakerism, and how that connected to issues like early Quakers’ views of the sacraments. The next day had four sessions. One was a panel with three speakers addressing the three controversial issues among Young Adult Friends: what do Quakers think about the second coming; what do Quakers think about Satan; and should Quakers adopt a position of more latitude in terms of what church music are allowed into Friends’ churches.

This all plays into the Quaker identity issue in one way or another. Take church music: Quakers in Cuba are clear that they are not Pentecostal. They are concerned about the waves of Pentecostalism in Cuban culture that threaten to overtake various forms of Cuban Christianity. One evening, while I was riding on the microbus, we passed a Pentecostal church service that was just ending. There were hundreds of people walking away from the church service. It was clearly very popular. Cuban Quakers like individual Cuban Pentecostals, (some work for Quakers in positions such as garderner) and even invite Cuban Pentecostal groups to rent their church complex: the “Orthodox” who rented the Gibara complex while I was there were Pentecostals, I was told. But Cuban Quakers are not about to adopt a premillennialist position on Second Coming for example.

One of the further workshops was offered by Lazaro, pastor of the Friends’ Church at Velasco, on the topic of “evangelization.” He asked me briefly to speak about evangelization in the United States, and I mentioned that evangelization by way of crusade seems on the decline here, but that the internet (both websites and blogs) were becoming more important in the US. I have a sense that evangelization in Cuba is quite different, especially since they have no internet.

The last week that I was in Cuba, I presented two more workshops. I visited the eastern end of the Yearly Meeting, in the neighborhood of Banes, the headquarters for the United Fruit Company prior to the Cuban revolution. The Banes church is beautiful, with three F.U.M. work teams having done great work in restoring it. There is a beautiful garden in the Banes complex. Hurricane Ike occasioned great damage. Cuban Friends spent fifteen full days just getting the fallen trees and debris out of the Banes church grounds after the hurricane. But the garden has made a great recovery, albeit with many fewer trees.

This workshop was held in El Retrete, a church mission that was just given monthly meeting status. I was privileged to see the ceremony at which El Retrete received Monthly Meeting status. Within the space of a couple of hours, a Nominating Committee was appointed, met, made its report, and the new Monthly Meeting, with help from many wise elders throughout the yearly meeting, composed its first minute. I then conducted a workshop, which included my Light of Christ talk, and a session on Quaker Spirituality focusing on John Woolman. My last workshop, at Bocas meeting, incorporated just the Light of Christ talk.

Cuba Yearly Meeting is a wonderful place that has accomplished much in two short decades under daunting odds. When the most severe repression ceased in Cuba, Cuban Quakers had less than 100 members. Anyone can tell you who were the faithful ones, the handful in each meeting, who kept the Cuban Quakers going in the years when the Cuban Communists were officially atheist and trying to put religion out of business. They are now up to about 500 members. Will they be able to keep their church growing?

Steve Angell is the Geraldine Leatherock Professor of Quaker Studies at Earlham School of Religion.

Following in the Footsteps of Thomas Kelly

By Carole Spencer

Chance
Providence
Luck
Good fortune
Opportunity
Destiny
Divine intervention…

These are some of the words that came to mind upon finding myself in lush, colorful, exotic Honolulu in early April in the midst of a busy spring semester when the Mid-west was still recovering from an especially bitter and icy winter.  Finding myself in Hawaii unexpectedly in April 2011 connected the dots on my spiritual journey in a most intriguing way beginning with my introduction to Quaker spirituality through the writer, Thomas Kelly, many years ago.

Those of you familiar with the Quaker landscape will know the name Thomas Kelly--educator, philosopher, and Christian mystic who became legendary in the Quaker world after his early death in 1941 when occasional writings from the last three years of his life were collected and published posthumously as A Testament of Devotion.

I first met Kelly through this slim, little book when like many spiritual seekers of the radical counter-cultural 60s and 70s, I had left my childhood faith far behind and was looking for something deeper and less “traditional” to fill the spiritual vacuum.  Ironically, in discovering Kelly’s book I found not only Quakerism, but a more ancient mystical Christian tradition that I had never known.  Kelly’s little book rocked my world and inspired me to join with Friends, go to seminary, and even played a significant part in my becoming a seminary professor.  But little did I know then that I would follow Kelly back to his Quaker home—literally!

When in the fall of 2010 a door unexpectedly opened to teach at Earlham School of Religion, I felt a strange nudge to book a flight to Richmond and interview for the position, even though I could not possibly imagine uprooting myself from my family and friends, the ocean and mountains of the great Pacific Northwest which had been home for 30 years, or George Fox Evangelical Seminary where I had taught for the past 15. Yet I felt a strong, distinct sense of call to ESR and Richmond. I could not explain the compelling leading, but it was unmistakable, and when the position was offered to me, I accepted with a sense of surprise and elation.

And through a most amazing experience of divine synchronicity I am now comfortably and joyfully settled into the house of my spiritual mentor, Thomas Kelly, which he had built in the 1920s when he taught philosophy at Earlham College.

It is not hard to sense the spirit of Kelly as I prepare for my courses in the same office where Kelly prepared, and pray in the same places where Kelly prayed.  And it appears that the spirit of Thomas Kelly is so strong in my life that it drew me to Hawaii.  So here is rest of the story….
In the middle of spring semester, in the wintry doldrums of February, an inquiry came to ESR from Honolulu Friends Meeting, which as “fortune” would have it, Mandy Ford, Director of External Relations, forwarded to me:

Carole,

“I received a Traveling Ministries request from Honolulu Friends Meeting. They are looking for someone to provide a program on "Building a Spiritual Community", and I wanted to see if you would be interested. Of course this requires distant travel, although I'm sure you wouldn't mind a trip to Hawaii.”

Mandy

Guessing that traveling ministry requests from exotic far-away places in the South pacific are not usual occurrences at ESR, I enthusiastically responded to the request. Thus began a delightful email correspondence with the woman planning the program, Renie Wong.  Renie and I had what I can only describe as instant rapport; we seemed to be kindred souls.  And only much later, after spending a day with Renie on a “magical mystery tour” of the North Shore of Oahu, did I learn how both our stories connected with Thomas Kelly, but in very different ways.  It was only after accepting the call to visit Honoulu Friends Meeting, that I realized that Kelly had gone to Hawaii from Richmond 75 years before me, and I was following in his footsteps!

Kelly, I would come to learn, had grown up in rural Southwestern Ohio, and for much of his life seemed to be fleeing from his humble, mid-western Quaker roots. He once wrote “I hate the Middle West---every stick and stone of it.” In 1935 spiritually and intellectually restless in Richmond, Kelly wrote to a friend, “One can hardly comprehend the quest of the Buddha sitting under a maple sugar tree in a mid-west cornfield.” Shortly thereafter Kelly had opportunity to escape the Mid-west when he was offered a position at the Univ. of Hawaii where he could fulfill his deep desire to study Eastern philosophy and religion and engage in inter-faith dialogue in the crossroads of East and West.

After one year his plan of Eastern Studies in Hawaii was cut short when he was invited to join the faculty at Haverford College, his most cherished vocational dream. But in the short time he lived in Honolulu, Kelly left an indelible legacy.

My new soul friend Renie Wong, who organized the Quaker Gathering and invited me to speak, had a strong Earlham connection.  Her father, Sam Lindley, had been a student of Kelly’s at Earlham, and followed him to Hawaii, working his way across the Pacific Ocean on a tramp steamer. Thomas Kelly and Sam Lindley were part of a small group of Quakers who organized the first meeting for worship of Honolulu Friends and helped to found the meeting where I was now privileged to lead a weekend retreat on “building a spiritual community.” Sam Lindley like his mentor Thomas Kelly, became a professor of philosophy, but unlike Kelly, chose to make his home permanently in Honolulu.  A few years before Sam Lindley died, his daughter Renie returned to Honolulu and now lives in her father’s house.  Following Thomas Kelly and her father’s legacy, she is continuing to build a strong Quaker spiritual community in Hawaii where inter-faith dialogue and multiculturalism is always a part of the spiritual environment.

When I first accepted the invitation to visit Honolulu Friends, I did not make any connections between Kelly and Hawaii.  And not until I arrived did I learn I would be speaking to the very meeting he had helped establish in 1936.  And only after the Gathering ended did I learn that the Earlham student who admired and emulated Kelly so much he followed him across the ocean, was the father of the Friend who had invited me to Honolulu.  Divine synchronicity!

Carole Spencer serves as Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Earlham School of Religion. She is a recorded minister in Northwest Yearly Meeting.

Young Adult Friends Gathering Video Series – Saturday Morning and Afternoon

By Micah Bales

This is the third in a series of videos put together from footage and interviews taken during the 2010 Young Adult Friends Gathering in Wichita, Kansas. This gathering took place over the 2010 Memorial Day Weekend and was perhaps the most diverse and balanced YAF gathering in generations. Roughly equal numbers of Liberal-Unprogrammed, Pastoral and Evangelical Friends were in attendance, along with a small number of Conservative Friends.

This video provides a window into the first half of the first full day of the event, including interviews with participants.

For more information about the 2010 YAF Gathering, please check out the official website, which features the advance materials that Friends were asked to use in their preparation for the conference, as well as the epistle that those gathered issued at the end of the weekend.

Micah Bales serves as Coordinator of Young Adult Engagement at ESR. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Faith Kelley. He is active with Capitol Hill Friends and is a member of Rockingham Friends Meeting, Ohio Yearly Meeting.

Joerg Rieger, in the Flesh and on the Page

By Wayne Williams
It’s really quite revolutionary what he’s asking us to consider. Rieger’s book, Remember the Poor, develops the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez while holding hands with Jacques Lacan’s philosophy of the “other” and Frederick Herzog’s theologically impassioned social justice work in Latin America. To consider and elevate the poor by entering their world and giving them an authoritative voice requires us to reframe our privileged, empirical Christian worldview dramatically. Rieger’s Willson Lectures at ESR were grounded in his expert theological, Scriptural, philosophical, and ethical understanding of the problems contemporary Christians face to authentically carrying out Christ’s Gospel of good news for the poor. The problems are unequalled poverty in the face of capitalism’s ‘victory’, how to encounter the marginalized ‘other’, issues with questioning and relocating authority, and the need for the distribution of power. These manifold challenges can feel insurmountable to even a cock-eyed optimist like myself. Rieger was our theological tour guide into the Reality of the brokenness amidst our own Christian Empire. Aren’t we disgusted when the blinders come off? So when is the revolution?
The life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth was the revolution. Or has Jesus’ own Life and praxis been diminished by a converted empire’s insatiable need for power and authority? Unfortunately, Christ’s Gospel ministry to the impoverished, the diseased, and the sinners in His 1st century world has largely been subsumed by our Judeo-Roman-Christian Empire over the past two millennia. Empire has bigger priorities than care of the sick and suffering. The institutions of our inherited culture value authority, wealth, power, and dominion. What would Jesus say about all this?
Rieger’s message resonates at the crux of Christ’s Gospel and Empire. He debunks Empire’s blind economic doctrines, citing the ‘prosperity gospel’ as a prime example of religion intersecting economics with a blind faith in ‘the big ideas.’ Rieger asks if those who blindly accept religious doctrine are more likely to accept economic principles on blind faith as well.
The gap between rich and poor gets wider all the time. The disparity is unconscionable. Rieger argues that our Empire wants us to believe there is only one way to solve this problem. If God is always envisioned at the top, then we correlate that the privileged and powerful embody God’s character. Rieger invites us to look at those on the underside to understand what is really going on. What if God were at work not from the top but from the bottom of society? After all, none of the rights gained for women or minorities were given by a benevolent leader. They were hard fought from a grass roots movement.
Rieger argues for the common good. He cites Apostle Paul, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” as having solid bottom up logic. Rieger believes that the common good can be built from the bottom up. He articulates the challenges that this paradigm shift presents in a new vision of justice for the poor. There is enough to go around. The re/distribution of wealth, along with a re-evaluation of the role and value of labor and production are necessary. Rieger proposes the “good news for the poor” involves production, organization, and honoring creativity to the benefit of all. New economic models and alternatives are already at work.
Wayne is a current MDiv student at Earlham School of Religion. He is a member of Brooklyn Monthly Meeting, New York Yearly Meeting.

Rieger Without Romance - Reflections on the 2011 Willson Lectures

By Matt Hisrich
I would like to extend my appreciation to ESR for hosting the Willson Lectures, to David Johns for arranging Joerg Rieger’s visit, to Rieger himself for coming all the way to Richmond and presenting, and to Mandy Ford for working to make the lectures available for viewing online. I believe that Rieger’s goals are noble, and his analysis prompted me to give more significant thought to important questions than I would have otherwise. That’s a good outcome for the Willson Lectures, and I am confident that my experience is not unique.
Overall, my main response to Rieger’s lectures was of wanting more – a more robust critique of empire and economics, and more clear paths forward. After reading his book No Rising Tide in preparation for his visit, I couldn’t help but feel that the lack of clarity regarding the clear distinction between free markets and the interventionist chaos we are faced with today undermined both his analysis of economics as well as the validity of the conclusions he reached.  My hope as I arrived to listen to Rieger in person was that he would move beyond the limitations of that text.
Unfortunately, this hope was left unfulfilled. From the economic side, I stand by my initial critique of Rieger’s No Rising Tide as he offered little during the lectures to indicate that he does not in fact conflate free markets with a mercantilist system whereby “groups with political power use that power to secure government intervention to protect their interests while claiming to seek benefits for the nation as a whole.” This creates a significant problem in the solutions he presented at the Willson lectures – the political side of his analysis – grow out of this conflation.
As I read No Rising Tide, I was struck repeatedly both by the lack of clear steps toward the new reality Rieger envisions and by an all too uncritical approach toward public policy. He notes that “politicians are democratically elected by the people, while business leaders are not,” as if this puts an end to the discussion about corruption in government, and asks with genuine astonishment, “why would ‘government’ want to take just anything from its citizens, and who is ‘government’ in a democracy if not the citizens?”
These themes were again evident again in the lectures. Few concrete solutions were presented, and those that were raise more questions than real answers. He spoke several times about the importance of community gardens and labor unions, for instance, but it is difficult to see how these alone will begin to transform an empire and economic system that is so pervasive and domineering. His very limited comments on war and their connection to empire and economics should disturb any Friend. His assertion that when Jesus tells his disciples to tell John that the sick are healed and the blind can see is an affirmation of nationalized health care is an impressive leap. At one point during the Q&A period, he was asked how high unemployment should be addressed, and he suggested significant expansion of public sector jobs.
One must ask at this point why someone who speaks to “bottom up” power employs such “top-down” solutions through the state. The essential narrative that Rieger appears to operate out of is one in which the state is there to protect us from corporations. But while I would agree that the empire and economics as they exist today are pervasive and domineering forces in our lives, I wish that Rieger would expand the scope of his definition of empire to include democratic states that collude with business interests. 
His appreciation of democracy coupled with his disdain for corporations seems to prevent him from correctly identifying the crony capitalist nature of our economic system. This in turn prevents him from offering a response to empire-as-state that recognizes the incentives within the empire to expand the scope of its power whether employing the language or free markets or that of progressivism.  Sadly, therefore, the very remedies he suggests only serve to feed empire further.
In 1978, economist James Buchanan coined the phrase “politics without romance” to describe what he was trying to develop at the time – public choice theory. As Buchanan further elaborates, “Armed with nothing more than the rudimentary insights from public choice, persons could understand why, once established, bureaucracies tend to grow apparently without limit and without connection to initially promised functions. They could understand why pork-barrel politics dominated the attention of legislators; why there seems to be a direct relationship between the overall size of government and the investment in efforts to secure special concessions from government (rent seeking); why the tax system is described by the increasing number of special credits, exemptions, and loopholes; why balanced budgets are so hard to secure; and why strategically placed industries secure tariff protection.”
In order to build upon the work he has already undertaken, deepen his critique, and point readers toward solutions that begin to sever the ties between empire and economic interests, I would encourage Rieger to further explore public choice theory. As Buchanan argues, “Regardless of any ideological bias, exposure to public choice analysis necessarily brings a more critical attitude toward politicised nostrums to alleged socioeconomic problems.” If Rieger or others seek to strengthen their understanding of the connections between empire and economics, I would suggest Anthony de Jasay’s The State and Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan.
One of the definitions of theology is “faith seeking understanding.” During his lectures, Rieger issued a call for truly understanding the nature of the world around us so that we can be effective agents of change. Here’s where I would agree with him wholeheartedly. If at least part of our faith involves helping to bring about a more just and humane world, then there is no time to waste.
Matt Hisrich is the Ministerial Advocate for Indiana Yearly Meeting. He lives in Richmond, Indiana, with his wife and two daughters, and is a member of First Friends Meeting there. Matt is a graduate of Hillsdale College in Michigan and ESR, where he received his MDiv in teaching and theology. Prior to enrolling in seminary, he worked with non-profit public policy organizations in Indiana, Kansas, and Ohio.

Young Adult Friends Gathering Video Series – Friday Evening Program and Worship

By Micah Bales

This is the second in a series of videos put together from footage and interviews taken during the 2010 Young Adult Friends Gathering in Wichita, Kansas. This gathering took place over the 2010 Memorial Day Weekend and was perhaps the most diverse and balanced YAF gathering in generations. Roughly equal numbers of Liberal-Unprogrammed, Pastoral and Evangelical Friends were in attendance, along with a small number of Conservative Friends.

This particular video gives a glimpse into the opening evening of the YAF gathering, as Friends gather and begin to get to know one another.

For more information about the 2010 YAF Gathering, please check out the official website, which features the advance materials that Friends were asked to use in their preparation for the conference, as well as the epistle that those gathered issued at the end of the weekend.

Micah Bales serves as Coordinator of Young Adult Engagement at ESR. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Faith Kelley. He is active with Capitol Hill Friendsand is a member of Rockingham Friends Meeting, Ohio Yearly Meeting.