Over on his blog, Brent Bill has been making "A Modest Proposal" in five parts for the revitalization of the Quaker message in the United States. There's lots of good stuff in these posts, including a very funny video about what would happen if Starbucks marketed the way many churches do. (I think non-Quakers who [...]
I appreciated the responses to last week's Finding My Voice blog post, including Johan's musings on similar questions. I've decided to write a follow up essay for the Huffington Post on differing images of God to respond to the erroneous assumptions about believers that permeated the angry comments on my last article there, but since then the issue [...]
I'm really not sure how this summer experiment in posting out takes from the book has gone from a reader's point of view. There haven't been many comments, but my readership (according to my stat counter) seems to have remained steady. For me, it's been fun to scan through old drafts and the original interviews, [...]
Between it being Ramadan and the controversy over the Muslim center proposed a few blocks away from Ground Zero in New York, Islam is getting more mention than usual in the press these days. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much of it fosters understanding of the religion itself or the places where our beliefs are [...]
When I decided to spend the summer posting "deleted scenes" from the book, I wasn't really sure what I would find on the cutting room floor. Now, with two and a half weeks until publication of the paperback and this blogging experiment reaching it's end, it seems more got cut from the book than included [...]
Some of you have heard me say that it was pregnancy that inspired me to write The Wisdom to Know the Difference. That's mostly true, but the other thing that got me thinking about the Serenity Prayer was a 60 Minutes episode about Richard Leakey. This deleted bit of the book is one of the first [...]
My Quaker meeting recently had a session where we shared some of our experiences with money. Dealing with poverty–our own or other people's–was one of the themes that emerged. Afterward someone asked me what I thought of a famous Gospel quote about the poor. As it turns out, I have a few paragraphs about that [...]
Photo of MOMIX performanceNothing gets me feeling inspired to be creative like graduation at University of the Arts, where I’ve taught part-time for the past ten years. Six-hundred students in fields ranging from painting to musical theatre and multimedia can exude a lot of energy, especially when they are fired up about graduating. Then there [...]
Over on her blog What Canst Thou Say?, Robin M explains what she wants her children to learn in First Day School (which is Quakerspeak for Sunday school). While the post raises many important issues, the line that jumped out to me was this: “I want them to learn how to be a Quaker.” Given some [...]
Last Saturday I spoke to a group of Philadelphia Quakers about spiritual discernment, a topic I’ve been writing about for nearly 16 years, though the longer I write about it, the less I think I know. In general, my message over the years has been this: There is a Divine Spirit that offers us guidance, [...]
