Quakers, Ecology, and the Light


Book Description

As the community of life on this planet experiences the anthropogenic climate crisis, what tools from faith traditions can help us meet the coming challenges? By expanding the metaphor of light within the Christian and Quaker traditions to include light’s role in ecosystems, this project develops an ecotheology of light that aims to answer this question. Cherice Bock and Christy Randazzo draw on their contexts in the Religious Society of Friends, placing the Quaker Inward Light in dialogue with the Bible, and light in Eastern Orthodox, ecological, and interdependence theologies. The Quaker ecotheology of light developed argues that Light is a vitally important and mutually translatable metaphor providing a common language that can aid humanity, reinterpreting traditions to meet this moment with spiritual grounding to transition to a just and sustainable future for the Earth, our common home. Bock and Randazzo connect this ecotheology of light with implications for Friends testimonies.




Quakers, Ecology, and the Light


Book Description

By expanding the metaphor of light within the Christian and Quaker traditions to include light's role in our planet's ecosystems, this project develops an ecotheology of light. The authors connect the Inward Light to interdependence theologies and implications for Friends testimonies.




A Grounded Faith


Book Description

Grapple with Lenten themes as they relate to our relationship with Earth, with Indigenous worldviews, and with the beauty and vulnerability of this land and our place in it.




Letters to a Fellow Seeker


Book Description

In seven letters to a fictional correspondent, Steve Chase describes his spiritual journey among Quakers. The writer introduces the Quaker way to a newcomer in language that is personal and gentle, while offering powerful inspiration through stories.




Quaker Quicks: Open to New Light: Quakers and Other Faiths


Book Description

Open to New Light is not only for readers interested in exploring Quaker history and principles but also for anyone interested in different faiths and the relationships between them. The topics covered include Quakers' historic interfaith encounters, as well as more recent engagements with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Jains, Sikhs, Baha'is, followers of Indigenous religions and Humanists.




Adventures in the Spirit


Book Description

In Adventures in the Spirit, respected and influential theologian Philip Clayton argues that two major intellectual movements of our day-panentheism and emergence-are converging and that together they offer exciting new vistas for theological reflection. On the one hand, over the last decades many theologians have been re-conceiving the God-world relation panentheistically, affirming a radical indwelling of God within the world and the world within God. On the other hand, scientists have begun to abandon the reductionist ideology that characterized much of the modern period, with a new emphasis on emergence. Their study of how new, novel structures and entities arise throughout the evolutionary process yields a much more open-ended, holistic vision of reality, Clayton argues.




Quakers and Mysticism


Book Description

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.




Quakers Reading Mystics


Book Description

Over the centuries, Quakers have read non-Quakers regarded as mystics. This study explores the reception of mystical texts among the Religious Society of Friends, focusing in particular on Robert Barclay and John Cassian, Sarah Lynes Grubb and Jeanne Guyon, Caroline Stephen and Johannes Tauler, Rufus Jones and Jacob Boehme, and Teresina Havens and Buddhist texts selected by her. Points of connection include the nature of apophatic prayer, suffering and annihilation of self, mysticisms of knowing and of loving, liberal Protestant attitudes toward theosophical systems, and interfaith encounter.




Liberal Quaker Reconciliation Theology


Book Description

This work brings the fields of Christian theologies of atonement and reconciliation and Liberal Quaker theology into dialogue, and lays the foundation for developing an original Liberal Quaker reconciliation theology. This dialogue focuses specifically on the metaphorical language employed to describe the relationship of interdependence between humans and God, which both traditions hold as integral to their conceptions of human and divine existence. It focuses on these areas: the sin of human division and exclusion; atonement and reunification of humans and God as a response to sin; and the metaphors Liberal Quaker use to describe this interdependent relationship, specifically the metaphor of Light. This unique approach develops an original model of reconciliatory interdependence between humans and God that is rooted in both Christological and Universalist Liberal Quaker metaphorical and theological categories and utilizes the Liberal Quaker language of God as interdependent Light towards a new theology.




Our Life Is Love


Book Description

Our Life is Love describes the transformational spiritual journey of the first Quakers, who turned to the Light of Christ within and allowed it to be their guide. Many Friends today use different language, but are still called to make the same journey. In our time people seeking deeper access to the profound teachings of Christianity want more than just beliefs, they want direct experience. Focusing on ten elements of the spiritual journey, this book is a guide to a Spirit-filled life that affects this world. Quakers in the seventeenth century and today provide examples of people and communities living in the midst of the world whose radical understanding of Christ's teachings led them to become powerful agents of social change. The book offers a simple, clear explanation of the spiritual journey that is suitable not only for Quakers, but for all Christians, and for seekers wanting to better understand our spiritual experience and the fullness of God's call to us. The book would make an excellent focus for study groups. Marcelle Martin has led workshops at retreat centers and Quaker meetings across the United States. She served for four years as the resident Quaker Studies teacher at Pendle Hill and was a core teacher in the School of the Spirit program, The Way of Ministry. She is the author of the Pendle Hill pamphlets Invitation to a Deeper Communion and Holding One Another in the Light. In 2013 she was the Mullen Writing Fellow at Earlham School of Religion while working on this book.