Word: quakerly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Quakers had good reason to "dwell deep" last week, and seek for a leading "in the silence of the creature." Pacifism, one of the principles about which Friends are most touchy, had been challenged by Brand Blanshard, head of the Philosophy and Religion Department of Quaker Swarthmore College. It was typical of the Quakers that he was given four pages in the Friends Intelligencer for his attack. Friends had seldom read anything quite like...
Said Philosopher Blanshard, a Quaker convert: pacifism is "plainly immoral." A Friend, he maintained, can take up arms and still be a Friend. He rejected the position that "the use of organized force by one group upon another is always wrong." Since Japan invaded Manchuria, he wrote, pacifists have "made the renunciation of force into a Moloch whose idolatry had to be maintained, no matter what the cost in lawlessness, blood and misery...
...extreme emphasis on pacifism that we find today is a modern growth in the Society. I doubt if a single eminent early Quaker can be named who consistently condemned all war. Penn, [John] Bright and [Herbert] Hoover are the only three Quakers who have ever held positions of first-rate public responsibility, and none of them found it possible to retain the pacifist dogma...
Camp v. Camp. Many a Friend believes that Philosopher Blanshard has "outrun his Guide" and landed plump in the middle of an "unsoundness." But there is little chance that Quakers will disown him. His views too clearly reflect the peculiar conflicting feelings of Friends toward World War II. Several Quaker families have one son in uniform, another in a C.O. camp. One Philadelphia Meeting has as many young members in one as the other, corresponds with them all. Last spring a Long Island Meeting wrote this facing-both-ways sentiment into its minutes: "We hold in equal respect any member...
...Society has sound reasons for this course. Peace-loving U.S. Quakers have been split for more than a century by bitter religious differences; only since World War I have Friends managed to bring about something like Quaker unity. They are very reluctant to let any new issue disturb that unity-especially since Midwestern Evangelical Quakers (who are strong on doctrine) still look askance at East Coast Quakers, many of whom are Hicksites who put the authority of the Inner Light before the authority of the Bible...