Quaker Religion

It is 1969 and Glasgow is in the grip of the worst winter in decades, yet it is something else that has Glaswegians on edge: a serial killer whose name alone is enough to make them tremble with fear. The Quaker has killed another victim, snatching a young woman from a nightclub and dumping her body like trash in the back of a cold-water tenement. He leaves no clues, and the investigation has led police down one blind alley after another.

Many other mainline Christians viewed the Quakers as a dangerous sect, so much so that they pressured the British Parliament to pass the Quaker Act of 1662. This act set forth in law the “prescribed form” of prayer and worship as designated by the state. It was a formula that specifically left the traditions of the Quakers out. Unable to gain acceptance in England, the Quakers would soon leave the place of their origin altogether and try their luck in a brave new world on another continent.

Daily we are asked to move toward bravery, to stretch in the direction of goodness, kindness, forgiveness, patience, and vulnerability. Yet life's tender fragility, fear, anxiety, and our own practiced self-sabotage can derail us from growing and thriving, leaving us fractured and afraid.

Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, the author, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this often hilarious book, she describes her time in the barn as well as an extended visit to a Buddhist monastery in France.

The Fearless Benjamin Lay chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man - a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theater to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity.

No Cross, No Crown is a soul-searching indictment of half-hearted hypocritical Christianity written by William Penn, a fearless Christian who braved the King and the Church of England in his quest to follow the teachings of Christ. First published in 1682, this new edition is an entirely new translation of William Penn’s 2nd edition into modern English and clear syntax. Penn’s meaning is preserved, and his original words are left untouched whenever possible; but the result is far clearer and more accessible to the modern Christian than ever before.

The concept of the Stream, not original with Bill Taber, first appeared in his conscious mind during a Pendle Hill conference on the future of Quakerism about 1968 and has continued to have a powerful place in his consciousness ever since.

What interests the author is not so much the formal process of clearness for membership (important as that is), but rather the underlying spiritual movement by which individuals come to find their identity in the meeting community, how they come to a full sense of belonging; in short, how we come to be “members one of another.” It is clear that this is almost always a gradual process and not a single event, As Patricia Loring has written, we need a vision of membership as “a life-long process . . . of spiritual maturing or transformation.”