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QuakerSpeak, Philadelphia, PA (2025)

07/25/2025

"Quaker prayer," David Johnson explained to us in 2019, "is a matter of letting go of outward words, and of our thoughts and imaginations, and of centering down into a place of silence where we can wait and notice the movements of God within us."

What has your experience been with prayer as part of a Quaker practice? Have you felt what David describes as "a breathing from the heart of gratitude and joy"?

What does Quaker prayer look like? Australian Friend David Johnson says it’s something every human being does naturally, and it leads to inordinate spiritual refreshment.

07/18/2025

Even when there are conflicts around him, Pradip Lamichhane of the Bhaktapur Evangelical Friends Church says, "within myself, I feel peace." And it's that spiritually infused sense of peace that motivates him to try to resolve the issues that crop up within the family or the workplace or the church meeting. "Sometimes I fail," he admits. "That's okay!"

Pradip is one of many Quakers who've opened up, in our recent conversations, about how the peace testimony informs their faith, from individual encounters to perspectives on national and global affairs.

Even when there are conflicts around him, Pradip Lamichhane of the Bhaktapur Evangelical Friends Church says, “within myself, I feel…

07/11/2025

"The Book of Revelation... has been made into a joke and a laughing stock," C. Wess Daniels told us in 2021, soon after the publication of his book, Resisting Empire. He reminded us that the New Testament's grand finale isn't meant to be a prediction about the end of the world.

At its core, Revelation is "a two-thousand year old critique about stuff we’re still dealing with," Wess continued. "There’s a lot in there to unpack...There have been communities standing in resistance to this for thousands of years. Let’s draw on that wisdom and those tools where it helps—where we can—and join that community of resistance over time."

"Revelation doesn't have anything to do with predicting the end of the world," explains C. Wess Daniels.

07/04/2025

Willa Taber is a regular attender at Three Rivers, a q***r Christian Quaker Zoom-based group within New England Yearly Meeting. She had already been processing the emotional aftershocks of Donald Trump’s re-election last fall when, shortly upon taking office, he signed an executive order that, in essence, made her identity as a transgender woman illegal.

“Even in that numbness and shock,” she says, “my response was to take my Trans Pride flag out and put it on my porch—saying, ‘I am here, I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not going to hide.”

Willa Taber had already been processing the emotional aftershocks of Donald Trump’s re-election last fall when, shortly upon taking office,…

06/27/2025

"In the deepest well of my heart, there’s a place where I touch God and God touches me and it’s like a connection point," Christopher Sammond told us in 2023. It took him a long time to feel that connection, though. He shared a story about a Quaker retreat at Pendle Hill, where he was surrounded by Friends who seemed more spiritually attuned than he was at that time.

"I could see they had something I wanted, but I didn’t even know what it was," he recalled. "But I could tell that they had something that I was after."

“Putting language on the experience of that of God within us, I think, is a risky business,” says Christopher Sammond.…

06/23/2025

"My journey into faith and with faith and through faith is primarily to do with seeking a direct connection and communication with the Divine," Tim Gee explains—and for a long time, that led (as it has for many Friends) to Scripture taking a back seat.

"As I've experienced a number of things, though, I've found great companionship with different people in the Bible—wonderful empathy as I observe them seeking a direct relationship with the Divine, trying to understand what it is God wants them to do."

You know, there’s a story about a Jewish scholar, probably the same amount of time as Jesus was, and he was challenged to recite the whole of Scripture while standing on one leg. And he stood on one leg and said, “ Do not do unto others what is hateful unto yourself, everything else is detail.

06/13/2025

As the members of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends wrestled with leaving their former yearly meeting over, among other issues, the question of LGBTQ+ inclusion, Erin Wilson felt a strong personal investment in the matter. "I realized that I was getting very defensive about the way that LGBTQ+ folks were being treated," she told us two years ago. "It took several months for me to figure out, 'Oh! It’s because I’m not straight.'"

As the members of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends wrestled with leaving their former yearly meeting over, among other issues,…

06/06/2025

"Twelve years ago, when I first started engaging in a public ministry around abuse," Windy Cooler recalls, "I thought that good policy was the answer." She came to realize, however, that trying to get meetings to adopt policies to address domestic and sexual violence against children and adults led to power struggles that "were not the way that Quakers make decisions."

“Twelve years ago, when I first started engaging in a public ministry around abuse,” Windy Cooler recalls, “I thought that…

05/30/2025

This month's Friends Journal features the Young Friends Bookshelf, a twice-yearly showcase of books for children and adolescent Friends. The latest offerings include Scattergood, a novel by H.M. Bouwman about a teenage girl during the Second World War and her experiences at a real-life Quaker settlement in Iowa for refugees from N**i Germany.

One of Bouwman's sources for writing about Scattergood was the historian Michael Luick-Thrams, who told us about the settlement in this 2022 interview.

In the summer of 1938, a group of young Quakers in Iowa wrote a letter to the American Friends Service…

05/23/2025

Kins Aparece is the initiatives coordinator for the Asia West Pacific working group of Friends Peace Teams. She recently talked to QuakerSpeak about her work, which can include projects like acquiring motorized fishing boats for a community devastated by a typhoon. Before that, though, she and her colleagues draw upon Quaker faith and practice to ground themselves in worship and listen to the people they hope to serve with open minds and open hearts.

"This is a very powerful practice," Kins says. "It changes communities. It changes organizations. And we can do it every day... This is human. This is how friends should be."

Kins Aparece is the initiatives coordinator for the Asia West Pacific working group of Friends Peace Teams. She recently talked…

05/16/2025

George Fox showed Friends that "when we stand still in the Light, we come to see ourselves as we really are," but, as Doug reminded us in 2018, we also come to a fuller understanding of our place in creation. Thus "the ways in which [we] stand for peace and justice and sustainability with the ecosystems of the world," he said, become "our definition of salvation in the 21st century."

Connecting with nature is about more than just exercise or tranquility. As Quaker author Doug Gwyn shares, even in the 17th century, Quakers were concerned about our disconnection with the natural world and what it would mean for the future.

05/09/2025

"Sometimes when I was on the mountain looking after sheep," Abel Sibonio recalls, "I could hear some good and kind voices, often requesting me to consecrate my life to Christ." That led him to working with the evangelical Friends Church in Burundi and later in a refugee camp in Tanzania, until threats from local police challenged by his protection of his congregation prompted him to relocate to Australia.

How did he persevere through such circumstances?

“Sometimes when I was on the mountain looking after sheep,” Abel Sibonio recalls, “I could hear some good and kind…

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