The Quaking Meeting

Explores Christian meditation and silence from theological, mystical, and practical viewpoints. Examines common experiences of the Quakers' Meetings for Worship.

In a Pennsylvania town where anti-war sentiments are treated with contempt and violence, Matt, a fourteen-year-old girl living with a Quaker family, deals with the demons of her past as she battles bullies of the present, eventually learning to trust in others as well as herself.

This book examines the nearly 400-year tradition of Quaker engagements with mystical ideas and sources. It provides a fresh assessment of the way tradition and social context can shape a religious community while interplaying with historical and theological antecedents within the tradition. Quaker concepts such as “Meeting,” the “Light,” and embodied spirituality, have led Friends to develop an interior spirituality that intersects with extra-Quaker sources, such as those found in Jakob Boehme, Abū Bakr ibn Tufayl, the Continental Quietists, Kabbalah, Buddhist thought, and Luyia indigenous religion. Through time and across cultures, these and other conversations have shaped Quaker self-understanding and, so, expanded previous models of how religious ideas take root within a tradition. The thinkers engaged in this globally-focused, interdisciplinary volume include George Fox, James Nayler, Robert Barclay, Elizabeth Ashbridge, John Woolman, Hannah Whitall Smith, Rufus Jones, Inazo Nitobe, Howard Thurman, and Gideon W. H. Mweresa, among others.

This original interpretation of the lives and social interactions of Quaker women in the British Atlantic between 1650 and 1750 highlights the unique ways in which adherence to the movement shaped women's lives, as well as the ways in which female Friends transformed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious and political culture.

This is a history of the Quakers of Lewes Meeting from its origin in 1655. From being persecuted by the other inhabitants they gradually achieved respectability and then civic prominence. Their religious thinking has developed over the years, but it is still centered in the silent Meeting for Worship.

Reflecting on Montaigne, Virginia Woolf remarked, "The most common actions-a walk, a talk, solitude in one's own orchard-can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind." In Quotidiana, Patrick Madden illuminates these common actions and seemingly commonplace moments, making connections that revise and reconfigure the overlooked and underappreciated.

Join an adventure walking in the shoes of Abigail Adams, wife of the second President of the United States, John Adams. Many stepping stones along this journey are first-hand accounts of Abigail’s correspondence before, during, and after the birth of her nation. Her forthright, knowledgeable insights reporting from the hotbed of Boston during the Revolution reveal the struggle of a young, loving family often separated as they balanced the needs of family vs. the needs of the emerging nation. You will encounter discourse from famous people and witness Abigail’s benevolence. She taught a young African-American boy to read, advocating for his inclusion in a traditional school. An early abolitionist, she also fought for women’s education and suffrage. Share her anguish as she buried four of her children. Realize Abigail’s political prowess as chief advisor to John. Abigail became the first of two valiant women to wear the labels of both wife and mother of an American president. This passionate portrayal of Abigail’s life highlights the hardships endured by the patriots to cement America’s values of liberty and justice for all.

"If we as Quakers want our Quaker approach to faith to be vibrant, cohesive, coherent and socially useful, we need to be clear about what we are and what we are not." In the last 150 years the backdrop to our Quaker experience has changed. Have we as Quakers been prey to inroads of secularism and individualism? Have these inroads left Quakers in Britain a diffuse and diluted faith community? Ben Pink Dandelion asks rigorous and difficult questions about what it means to be Quaker today within this context. In this important and exciting book we are challenged to consider how we retain an authentic encounter with the Divine, how we become a transformed and transforming community.

In First Among Friends, the first scholarly biography of George Fox (1624-91), H. Larry Ingle examines the fascinating life of the reformation leader and founding organizer of the Religious Society of Friends, more popularly known today as the Quakers. Ingle places Fox within the upheavals of the English Civil Wars, Revolution, and Restoration, showing him and his band of "rude" disciples challenging the status quo, particularly during the Cromwellian Interregnum. Unlike leaders of similar groups, Fox responded to the conservatism of the Stuart restoration by facing down challenges from internal dissidents, and leading his followers to persevere until the 1689 Act of Toleration. It was this same sense of perseverance that helped the Quakers to survive and remain the only religious sect of the era still existing today. This insightful study uses broad research in contemporary manuscripts and pamphlets, many never examined systematically before. Firmly grounded in primary sources and enriched with gripping detail, this well-written and original study reveals unknown sides of one who was clearly "First Among Friends."