Month: February 2023

  • Let’s Get Bored Together: The Practice of Silence and Resisting the Attention Economy

    I am teaching a class this semester at Guilford College called, “The Practice of Silence.” The class is both what it sounds like and a lot more. We are studying the Quaker theology behind the Quaker practice of silence but we’re also studying it from the broader lens of building focus, attention, and learning how…

  • Hurry by Marie Howe

    We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery storeand the gas station and the green market andHurry up honey, I say, hurry hurry,as she runs along two or three steps behind meher blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?To mine? Where one day…

  • Ask a Friend: Quaker Glossary and Terms

    An email I received recently asked about finding a Quaker glossary of terms online. This individual was looking specifically for an explanation of the Quaker use of the phrase “First Day” (what early Quakers, and some Quakers today still call “Sunday” so as to not call it by its Pagan name). Because there are any…

  • Bless this Mess: Beatitudes For Today

    What would be a local list of the beatitudes for your community look like if you were to make one? Lia Scholl, pastor of First Friends Meeting here in Greensboro, recently preached on Mt 5 and the Beatitudes. The message was great and she pointed out that in her reading the characteristics Jesus names are…

  • Confronting Beastly Economics – An Anti-Imperial Look at Revelation 13

    I have a chapter called “Beastly Economics” in the book, We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible With the Poor People’s Campaign. In the chapter, I discuss the concept of the “Mark of the Beast” not as some mark on a person or group in the future, but as a way of describing systems of economic oppression.  Even better, Ebony…