Looking at the ills of our times, it seems that early Friends had the antidote that is so desperately needed today. They experienced the simple but extremely difficult Truth that we are loved unconditionally and are called to live lives of integrity and love – and to do this together in community.
In A Call to Friends: Faithful Living in Desperate Times, Marty Grundy argues that we need to envision a different way to organize society that is not inherently exploitative, hierarchical, racist, and patriarchal. New economic and political systems can evolve from a Spirit-inspired vision of a different social system.
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Why would a family with ten children leave the safe and loving embrace of their ancestral home to journey into the American frontier? Lois Jordan’s book, Journey by Faith, leads us to consider the 1830 journey of a New Jersey Quaker family as they leave their home, friends, and family to travel along the Erie Canal and explore the wilds of Michigan and Ohio. Based on actual journals written by family members, this book chronicles the depth of soul-searching and faithful seeking that this family endured as they made their move. Appropriate for middle school to adult readers, this brief portion of one family’s history gives us a glimpse into the Quaker faith.
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer publicly confronted Nazism and anti-Semitic racism in Hitler's Germany. The Reich's political ideology, when mixed with theology of the German Christian movement, turned Jesus into a divine representation of the ideal, racially pure Aryan and allowed race-hate to become part of Germany's religious life. Bonhoeffer provided a Christian response to Nazi atrocities.
In this book author Reggie L. Williams follows Bonhoeffer as he defies Germany with Harlem's black Jesus. The Christology Bonhoeffer learned in Harlem's churches featured a black Christ who suffered with African Americans in their struggle against systemic injustice and racial violence – and then resisted. In the pews of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Bonhoeffer absorbed the Christianity of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Native is about identity, soul-searching, and the never-ending journey of finding ourselves and finding God. As both a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation and a Christian, Kaitlin Curtice offers a unique perspective on these topics. In this book, she shows how reconnecting with her Potawatomi identity both informs and challenges her faith.
Curtice draws on her personal journey, poetry, imagery, and stories of the Potawatomi people to address themes at the forefront of today's discussions of faith and culture in a positive and constructive way. She encourages us to embrace our own origins and to share and listen to each other's stories so we can build a more inclusive and diverse future. Each of our stories matters for the church to be truly whole. As Curtice shares what it means to experience her faith through the lens of her Indigenous heritage, she reveals that a vibrant spirituality has its origins in identity, belonging, and a sense of place.
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A freezing cold winter day, a disemboweled 250-pound hog hangs over a vat of hot water in the farmyard. The carcass will be scalded and scraped clean. A few neighbors have come to help and the women are already cleaning the chitterlings that will encase the sausage made from meat scraps.
In Shelby’s Lady: The Hog Poems, Shelby Stephenson has captured all the hard and often dirty work that goes into prepping and preserving a slaughtered pig before refrigerators were common. I remember salting the hams, drying the links of sausage or rendering the fat for lard. Shelby shows us again a way of life that has almost completely disappeared.
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Consider the moments in this collection - a mother is buried, a son is born, Alaska melts - each event a signpost. Reflect on the signs of rest and restlessness, simplicity and complexity, life given and taken and throbbing. This is the way of faith. We watch for truth’s brilliant appearance, and in the midst of our heartbreak-while-waiting, we pray. Jeffrey Johnson’s poems listen to the angels, they sing the doxologies, they pay loving attention to life. They are prayers. They will help you feel the power of life. They will teach you to pray.
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Ann Preston (1813-1872) is best known as a medical pioneer and nineteenth century Quaker activist. The immediate cause of the publication of Cousin Ann's Stories for Children (1849) was most likely the then recent 27 hour escape at the end of March, 1849, of Henry "Box" Brown, a Richmond slave who left his family and escaped north in a small wooden crate. Though Cousin Ann's Stories for Children is one hundred and sixty-two years old, it still speaks to contemporary concerns and moral perspectives. In its address "To My Little Readers" she explains, "I thought I would write a little book, and that would be a good way to speak with you, though I am far away." What Cousin Ann speaks of is practicing temperance, healthy diet and avoidance of tobacco, to treasure freedom and abhor slavery, the bounty and beauty of God's creation, the need to treat others generously and honestly.
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