Today's discussion question

[alice wellintown]

Also very good, if you can find it: _The Quakers: An International History
John Cunningham D.D.

Also part of the Quaker History Series, not easy to find but very good,

_Studies in Mystical Religion_
Fufus M. Jones, M.A., D, Lit,

And, on Quakers and Slavery

Thomas Drake's Quakers and Slavery in America



On 8/17/13, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/ward1956a.html
>
>
>
> On 8/17/13, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Yeah, Ok...whatever...
>> On 8/17/13, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>> Your take on Fox is typical of your willingness to take probably some
>>> opinion you approve of and without serious research to cast as truth
>>> what
>>> is
>>> a rather feeble bit of argumentation.
>>> In fact Fox was arguing for what several posts here are describing- a
>>> direct
>>> spiritual and transformative experience not hinged to doctrine as the
>>> Puritans emphasized or to the practices of the Church of England. What
>>> emerged was a distinctly non-heirarchichal community which for 300 years
>>> has
>>> refused to embrace a creedal statement and been consistently ant-war and
>>> for
>>> human rights. . As far as describing its historic course or the reasons
>>> it
>>> grew, you are simply unqualified to have a serious opinion and what you
>>> offer is blatherous nonsense.
>>> On Aug 16, 2013, at 11:42 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>>
>>>> So we return to H.L. Mencken's Book of Prefaces and his scathing,
>>>> witty,  and famous definition of Puritanism.
>>>>
>>>> I don't know what Friends or Catholics or Presbyterians or Baptists or
>>>> Lutherans know about the history of Christain idea, doctrines, dogmas,
>>>> let alone the particular and seperate squables that formed, and often
>>>> dismembered these (and the Quakers or Froiends declined in number
>>>> because they were so open to the ideas of others, though we see the
>>>> Readings Out in M&D....), and I imagine that Quakers or Friends,
>>>> though in my experience very knowledgable about history, know less
>>>> than their counterparts who attend sermons on a Sunday and are
>>>> subjected to the history of the churches at least a few times in the
>>>> year.
>>>>
>>>> The Reformation needed, in the minds and hearts of "puritans",
>>>> reform. Puritan, term, long before Mencken abused it,  was a term of
>>>> derision. Often, as is the case with Shakers and Quakers, co-opted,
>>>> but still, as the government continued to hang, jail, and punish, and
>>>> as religious toleration was only something prayed for, the number of
>>>> Puritans ever increased as the violence visited up their covered heads
>>>> increased (How's that for the want of violence?). War, and the fear of
>>>> Rome, or anything Papist, and the attempt to force everyone under one
>>>> tent only increased the anarchy, as more and more, strange
>>>> manifestations of the religion sprang up from the bloody fields. Sects
>>>> multiplied  and then multiplied, some died, some split, some gave
>>>> birth to children they didn't recognize or disowned, cast into the
>>>> river or upon the devil's door. Why Fox's madness spread is hard to
>>>> say. I doubt it has anything to do with what you list in your post,
>>>> Joseph. Fox was, in modern psychological terms, morbid, melancholic,
>>>> over the rainbow, crazy. But the hysterical history that engulfed this
>>>> poor suffering soul was, as fortune's wheel turned, grace. Had the
>>>> madness of history not met the madness of Fox, he would have died,
>>>> probably at his own hand, a Cobbler's hammer to the skull.
>>>
>>>
>>
>