Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 34 - Q for QUIP

In any Quaker Alphabet blog for Q there is a plethora of choice when it comes to acronyms, of which Friends are perhaps too fond. When it came down to it, however, there was really only one I could choose. QUIP - Quakers Uniting in Publications - is a group that I am proud and happy to belong to and work with. Both the principles behind it and the people I have got to know through it have influenced and helped my personal spiritual development in a major way and I would like to make it better known among Friends.

QUIP is an organisation set up in 1983 to allow publishers and booksellers to meet, talk and exchange ideas and expertise. When I first encountered it in the 1990s Chris Skidmore and I had just set up a small desk-top publishing business, the Sowle Press, to publish books about Quaker history, spiritual autobiography and editions of neglected Quaker works from the past. We started going to QUIP's annual conferences and this took me to the USA for the first time.

A 'Quaker Tapestry' panel for QUIP

QUIP is an international body with members in the Americas, the UK and Europe. It also covers all the varied approaches to Quakerism, both evangelical and liberal. This might have led to awkwardness between people from different religious backgrounds, but given a common purpose - as Quakers put it, publishing the truth - in my experience that has never been the case. In fact QUIP meetings were where I learned in more depth about the range of Quakers in the world family of Friends and got to know some of them as individuals. I hope that QUIP has made me less insular in my attitudes and I do try to communicate that as much as I can.

As well as being an organisation for publishers QUIP, in partnership with Friends General Conference, has also produced some books itself. Perhaps the most influential of these have been the two 'youth' books, Whispers of Faith in 2005 and Spirit Rising in 2010. These anthologies allow all Friends and others (not just the young) to hear the voices of a wide range of young people from many countries and a great diversity of traditions expressing their spiritual experience in their own words.

The process of producing these two books has helped QUIP to embrace a new direction, including writers as well as publishers and investigating how best to use new ways of publishing and communicating. Several of the recent conferences have been following aspects of this new way of doing things.

Whenever I talk about QUIP I usually find that very few Quakers in the UK have heard of them, but if you want to know more I recommend  you to visit their website or read the inspiring report of the last conference written by Sarah Katreen Hoggatt, one of the editorial board for Spirit Rising, and find out!

Quaker Alphabet Week 10 - E for Equality

Equality as a Quaker testimony derives from the conviction, as George Fox put it, that there is 'that of God in every one'. As with the other testimonies, to peace, truth and simplicity, equality is a work in progress which we do not always live up to either individually or corporately.

When I think of equality in a Quaker context what first comes to my mind is equality between women and men. It is often said that there has always been equality between men and women in the Society of Friends, but this is only a partial truth. While in general there has been spiritual equality, Quakers have often retained the temporal attitudes to the roles of the sexes that have been part of the world in which they lived and live. There are examples of this scattered through the biographies that I am writing as part of the Quaker Alphabet.

Back in the 1980s I was a member of the Quaker Womens Group and helped to write and present the QWG Swarthmore lecture Bringing the Invisible into the Light at Yearly Meeting in Exeter in 1986. The fact that Quakers had sometimes fallen short in their testimony to equality was one of our themes and we encountered a very hostile reaction from some quarters for daring to question an accepted truth.

There are other areas in which Quakers have not always managed, consciously or unconsciously, to be true to their testimony to equality. Friends in Britain have exhibited some racist attitudes as Lilamani Woolrych found when she was a Joseph Rowntree Quaker Fellow in 1993 and published in her report Communicating across cultures.

More recently Vanessa Julye and Donna McDaniel have looked  at the record of American Quakers in this area in their 2011 book Fit for Freedom, not for Friendship and found it less than perfect. Although Quakers worked to right the wrongs of African Americans they were uncomfortable about living with them as equals or accepting them as full members of the Society of Friends. Black Friends were expected to take their place on the 'back benches' and had to fight for full acceptance as members.

In the same way lack of equality related to social class or educational differences was and perhaps still is an issue among Friends. When the Adult School movement was at its height among Quakers in the 19th and 20th centuries some of the working-class pupils wanted to be

An application form for Quaker Associate Membership

come Friends but it was felt that they were not ready for full membership and a new category, associate membership was created for them. No doubt the Friends concerned thought they were being kind but
they were not accepting these people as equals.

I feel that it is important for Friends to recognise that we have failed to live up to our testimony to equality in the past and may be failing always to live up to this and other testimonies today. If we do not recognise this we run the risk of falling into the trap of self-righteousness. It is salutary to remember that Quakers are no more perfect than the rest of humanity and never have been.