Sitting in Silent Worship revitalizes your soul and connection to the Light. Singing along with a hymn does not pay rent. In Your Hand in Front of Your Face, Josh Talbot connects the Gospel with the need for economic betterment: The second post of a new blog, Musings of a Returning Quaker, was posted yesterday. Tagged AFAIK, article, experience, generation, junk, ministry, news, one, order, piece, possibility, Practice, President, Quaker, reading, start, the Guardian, time, yearly meeting 1 Comment But seriously, how does the president of a major seminary have such disregard for anything approaching academic rigor? Also: how much regurgitated junk is on the internet simply because people need to fill time? The Quaker caution about giving ministry just because you’re paid to give ministry and it’s time to give ministry seems apt in this case. They rearrange the text with interstitials like “he continues, and I quote” and “he goes on to say” so that Mohler can spend five minutes reading an article without sounding like he’s just reading an article. He has interns who scan buzzy news items. The SBTS president, Albert Mohler, repeatedly calls the Guardian article a “news report” even though it is clearly labeled as an opinion piece. If any publicity is good publicity then it’s good that non-Friends like Jenkins and now Mohler are talking about the decision-making process of a Quaker yearly meeting, but this is stupid piled on stupid.įrom a media perspective, I get it: Mohler has a daily 24-minute podcast to fill. The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary more or less reads Jenkins’s piece aloud on his radio show (hat-tip havedanson on the Quakers subreddit). He lightly skips over the fact that Jenkins isn’t Quaker and admits to limited experience of Quaker worship. At the time, I speculated that “Jenkins is chasing the headline to advance his own argument without regard to how his statement might polarize Friends.” AFAIK, there was no substantive discussion on what the revisions might bring. Many yearly meetings do this every generation or so. There were a lot of exaggerations in it the yearly meeting session was mostly deciding whether it it felt led to start the long process of revising the document of Friends’ belief and practice. As readers will probably remember, a few weeks ago, non-Friend Simon Jenkins wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian about the possibility of British Friends dropping God from their Faith and Practice. Chalk this one up as another whisper-down-the-lane.