The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary more or less reads Jenkins’s piece aloud on his radio show (hat-tip havedanson on the Quakers subreddit). He lightly skips over the fact that Jenkins isn’t Quaker and admits to limited experience of Quaker worship. At the time, I speculated that “Jenkins is chasing the headline to advance his own argument without regard to how his statement might polarize Friends.” AFAIK, there was no substantive discussion on what the revisions might bring.

Many yearly meetings do this every generation or so. There were a lot of exaggerations in it the yearly meeting session was mostly deciding whether it it felt led to start the long process of revising the document of Friends’ belief and practice. As readers will probably remember, a few weeks ago, non-Friend Simon Jenkins wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian about the possibility of British Friends dropping God from their Faith and Practice. Tagged American, friendsjournal, Henry Cadbury, look, means, mouth, name, need, order, pacifism, peace, Quaker, racism, side, speech, value Leave a comment President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminiary on Simon Jenkins articleĬhalk this one up as another whisper-down-the-lane. It’s never good to lecture the oppressed on their oppression, but the classic Quaker idea of speaking truth to all sides still holds value and is something I think we miss sometimes nowadays. I was a little easier on Cadbury, mostly because I think we need to understand the Quaker worldview out of which he was speaking. I gave my take on Cadbury’s speech back in June. What good is ineffective pacifism? My commitment to nonviolence is about saving lives.

And interrupting racist violence takes more than civil discourse: active disruption is needed in order for racism to be revealed and dismantled. Standing up for peace means standing on the side of the oppressed, not throwing them into the lion’s mouth in the name of civility.

From the AFSC’s Lucy Duncan, a look back at Henry Cadbury’s now-infamous 1934 speech to American rabbis and a look at the civility debate in modern America.

Update for faviconographer