With This Issue #34, Quaker Theology enters its 21st year. The year began with a surprise: I was contacted by Joe & Cara Pfeiffer around Christmas 2019. They're pastors of an Evangelical Friends Church near Los Angeles, in Midway City California. They said they had a story, and maybe I could help them and their church.Me, helping evangelicals? Why ask me? Anyway, I'm 3000 miles away.Because I do a blog, they said, which is sometimes widely read. (And, maybe they were a bit desperate?)Well, you know I'm a liberal, I said. ...
Read More
With This Issue #34, Quaker Theology enters its 21st year. The year began with a surprise: I was contacted by Joe & Cara Pfeiffer around Christmas 2019. They're pastors of an Evangelical Friends Church near Los Angeles, in Midway City California. They said they had a story, and maybe I could help them and their church.Me, helping evangelicals? Why ask me? Anyway, I'm 3000 miles away.Because I do a blog, they said, which is sometimes widely read. (And, maybe they were a bit desperate?)Well, you know I'm a liberal, I said. They knew it. OK, tell me.It turned out to be quite a story, and yielded two widely-read blog posts, on afriendlyletter.com . I call it a Quaker David & Goliath saga. Turns out the struggle of Midway City Friends Community Church is one that spotlights some very important and timely theological issues, for Quakers and others. Joe Pfeiffer explains these in his essay, which I am very happy to publish here.Another good story follows, by George Amoss, Jr., a Baltimore area Friend. It is an excerpt from a memoir he wrote. It is part of our occasional series on Narrative Theologies, theology as lived. There's plenty of that here, as well as a coming of age, and a confrontation with war, God, belief and sexuality in the time of the Vietnam War.George is joined by a frequent contributor, Douglas (aka "Doug") Gwyn. We have known him as a theological historian, who has written in depth about early Friends, and recent American Quakers as well.But behind this diligent scholar-thinker persona, Doug has also been a singer/songwriter, producing and performing, as way opened, dozens of songs. Many (but not all) have Quaker topics, and many of those have a satirical, and occasionally trenchant edge. Most, explicitly or implicitly, reflect Doug's lifelong theological concerns.This expansive musical oeuvre has been largely shared only with very small audiences. But we were able to coax him out of his lair long enough to ask some questions about this parallel life, and the work it has yielded. Theological Quaker folksongs. Why not? And exclusively here.An even more tantalizing story is that of the longtime Quaker pastor Daisy Douglas Barr, a renowned Indiana preacher in the early 20th Century. It's tantalizing because while we know a fair amount of it, there's even more we don't.We know that while still an active Friends pastor, Barr became the Queen Bee of the Indiana Woman's section of the Ku Klux Klan -- the largest chapter during the 1920s Klan resurgence, including many Hoosier Quakers. And we know that after the Indiana Klan collapsed in multiple scandals, Daisy Douglas Barr carried on, and was still listed on the pastors' roster in Indiana Yearly Meeting til her death in1938. Yet there's so much we don't know: why was she drawn to the Klan Why did so many other 1920s Friends follow this same path? And maybe above all, at least here: why and how did she become so so prominent in the Klan that at a 1923 national meeting of Grand Dragons in Asheville, North Carolina, the only woman invited to join the group and speak was - Quaker Daisy Douglas Barr?We don't know. But we do know what Barr said to the dragons. It is here, in print we believe for the first time outside the Asheville meeting's proceedings. And there is plenty of theology in her lines, Quaker theology, even if we don't now want to name it or claim it.More sedate is H. Larry Ingle's review of two books exploring the political thought of two influential early Friends, William Penn and John Dickinson. How influential was their thinking in the shaping of what became the American Republic? Does it have any continuing relevance in today's tumultuous political realm?And to close this packed, thought-provoking issue, your Editor observes a landmark: the completion of 50 years of active peace witness at Quaker House of Fayetteville/Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with an assessment of the project as a theological enterprise.
Read Less
