Oct 21 2022
Oct 12 2022
If you follow me for long you’ll realize our family has a pretty complicated religious identity. I’m Quaker and my wife and kids are members of a Ukrainian Catholic church. But we also all spend a whole lot of time at Egg Harbor City Moravian Church. They have a great Sunday School program for the kids and are a kind bunch of folks.
This past weekend they hosted this year’s Moravian Youth Rally, made up largely of Caribbean churches in the East Coast, mainly NYC but coming from as far afield as DC and Toronto. As soon as you hear the gyms playing on steel drums you realize these aren’t your German Moravians. The hall was echoey and the space a little loud but it was fun to get out of our comfort zone and spend time with everyone. The highlight for me was the exuberant energy of the fashion show.
Oct 09 2022
My first “dang it’s cold!” run of the season. 10km easy run in 38° weather.
Oct 04 2022
An old-school author video chat from *Friends Journal. *Catherine Coggan wrote the delightful, “No Building—And Yet Still We Worship,” which appears in the October 2022 issue.
Sep 27 2022
This weekend surprisingly well on a 5k race: second in my age group/division. I may have to stop thinking of myself as a novice runner (I started 3 years ago).
Sep 22 2022
On September 16 we got a tour of the River and Field Campus of Washington College, in Chestertown, Md., where our son is starting his second year.
Our son is interested in environmental science and the existence of the 5,000-acre campus was one of the drawing points for us as we considered various schools. Campus director Mike Hardesty took us on a bus tour, explaining the history of the property and the art of finding common ground between farmers and environmentalists. Highlights were the extensive meadows, the bird banding station, and a tunnel that is used to test different types of glass for bird impacts.
Sep 21 2022
I’ve expanded this and moved it to my main blog. See: Unbinding the Local.
Sep 20 2022
Tech news site The Verge going old school returning to a blog format.
The new site looks a lot more like Twitter than a front page. And that’s kind of the point. Patel has said The Verge’s competition is not Wired or The New York Times but Twitter “and other aggregators of audience.” As other news outlets shift resources toward building communities where readers are already spending lots of time — YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Discord, etc. — The Verge wanted to be sure it was investing closer to home, too.
I think a lot about aggregating too—basically sharing, both as myself and for Friends Journal. I don’t want to duplicate FJ content (we have a great email newsletter for that, with a sign-up form at the bottom of every page) but instead to highlight things I find particularly interesting, perhaps things I can give a bit more context too. There’s also great writing happening elsewhere.
Apr 25 2022
Don’t know what’s going to happen with Twitter but glad this account is still chugging along.
Mar 29 2022
The Peace Testimony and Ukraine →
Over on Friends Journal, the head of Sidwell Friends School on Quakers and pacifism is getting some attention, in part I think because it’s not absolutist on pacifism:
Quakers are short on dogma and long on discernment, a process that calls individuals to interrogate circumstances, seek truth, and act upon their conscience. Over the centuries individual Quakers have engaged in warfare provided they deemed the cause just. Somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of eligible U.S. and British Quakers fought in World War I, and approximately three-quarters chose to bear arms in World War II.
History is history, of course, and Friends’ attitudes have actually been more fluid than our peace testimony would let on.
The first rejoinder online comes from Don Badgley:
So, let us be clear; without the direct and present leadership of the Divine Source, our so-called “testimonies” crumble to dust. Absent that One Source these “testimonies” are little more than religio-political posturing, relics – and impossible to justify, especially within the context of the actual evil we see in the world today. Alternatively, when we testify to the whole world about the life-altering Truths that originate in our Experience of the Divine Presence, that ministry is imbued with a vital, even miraculous power.
As in most things Quaker, I’m intellectually in agreement with both of them. I’m personally quite pacifist. Even defensive wars kill innocents and liberatory good guys have become tyrants over and over again in history. But I have to admit I’ve been quite grateful to see Ukrainians sucessfully holding the Russian army at bay.
Lol! via Kottke
Mar 22 2022
Ruins at Weymouth Furnace