Monday, November 3, 2014

A magazine of old Quaker poetry and history for the Piedmont

A form of outreach that could happen easily (but with a lot of work... is that an oxymoron?) is a magazine recovering the Quaker history of the Piedmont, with connections to today.

For example, there are a lot of Quaker journals and poetry from the past. A photo essay with each one would illustrate whatever relevance they had for today. If it speaks to anyone, there could be a list
of Meetings in the area.

The moment

I've just read "Saving God" by Mark Johnston, whose major point is that our "self" is spread over the world, and that the "afterlife" of our selves is a form of idolatry. While I agree with him that our "atomic" self is fictional, fiction is still a work of art, and I find it hard to believe that God would throw away artwork; most of us think it is an awful loss that we are losing all the Victorian fiction, gradually, just by forgetting it's there, or the newspapers and magazines of 40 years ago. We keep our children's early scribbles. I think God doesn't want to lose us, even if "we" are not as separate from the world and each other as we think.