A Gathering of Spirits: The Friends General Conferences 1896-1950 Paperback – 29 May 2018
by Douglas Gwyn (Author)
formats and editions
Paperback
$43.17
This sweeping book tells about the development of Friends General Conference up to 1950, primarily through the lens of the Conferences.
One central motif is that these biennial gatherings renewed the courage and resolve of Friends to face the daunting disappointments of the first half of the 20th century. Modernity promised great advances in human society and no group was more confident of progress than FGC Friends at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
Through the conferences, the melancholy of two world wars, the capitalist debacle of the Great Depression, and the stubborn blights of American racism were turned into the spleen of renewed hope and activism, as Friends gathered together to learn, network, and find new reasons for hope.
Gwyn characterizes the first fifty years of the conferences as FGC's "heroic era."
A Gathering of Spirits will help FGC Friends discover the deeper roots of a tradition they continue to this day and to will draw renewed courage
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Print length
316 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Quakerpress of Fgc
Publication date
29 May 2018
Product description
Review
Friends General Conference is more than 135 years old. It has helped liberal American Friends get through peace and wars, booms and
busts, theological twists and turns, and not a few shocks of recognition. It has been the home and showcase for many important Quakers, most of whose stories and achievements have been sorely neglected. That's because FGC's "progressive" ethos has been resolutely anti-historical. Only now, Doug Gwyn has begun to open the door to seeing and learning from the journeys of FGC Friends. His story goes from its insurgent beginnings in the 1870s to a certified, if characteristically "peculiar" niche in the 1950s Protestant Mainstream. Doug's narrative is gentle but searching, and he deftly puts FGC into a wider historical and religious context. Those who want to understand this major stream of Quakerism, the better to ponder and shape its future, can do no better than to start here. -- Chuck Fager, author of Remaking Friends: How Progressive
Friends Changed Quakerism & Helped Save America
Doug Gwyn, a master of deep research and weaving multiple ideas and themes into a coherent whole, sharpens his focus to examine how today's "liberal" Friends evolved. From nineteenth century Hicksites, through the lens of biennial Friends General Conferences, to mid-twentieth century, we see FGC Friends and how they got here. By the beginning of the twentieth century Hicksite Friends mirrored the larger white middle class Protestant culture's focus on "practical Christianity" and "evolutionary progress," including "purity." The biennial Conferences that provide the lens for examining a half century of change, adopted the Chautauqua model of family vacations with uplifting lectures. Friends embraced the AFSC as the embodiment of moral activism. Two world wars and a Depression shook these complacent ethnocentric assumptions, as did the tireless work of individuals including Anna Jackson and Bayard Rustin enlarging Friends' understanding of racial issues, Rufus Jones and Clarence Pickett in emphasizing the importance of God, and a large cohort of Young Friends challenging lengthy vocal ministry, academic lectures, and the old divisions among Friends. Doug Gwyn weaves a variety of strands, inviting productive pondering of where we are and how we got here. -- Martha Paxon Grundy, author of Tall Poppies: Supporting Gifts of Ministry and Eldering in the Monthly Meeting
Doug Gwyn is probably contemporary Quakerism's most prolific and wide-ranging author, equally at home in the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. A Gathering of Spirits is an important contribution to understanding recent Quaker history, with implications and insights for historians, not only of Quakerism, but pacifism, social activism, and liberal religion generally. -- Thomas Hamm, Professor of History and Director of Special Collections, Earlham College and author of The Quakers in America
About the Author
Douglas Gwyn has served among Friends variously as a peace educator for the American Friends Service Committee, as a Friends pastoral minister, as a teacher at the Pendle Hill and Woodbrooke Quaker study centers, and as a writer. A student of Quaker history and thought for over forty years, he is drawn to the various streams of Friends and has sought to exercise a ministry of reconciliation among them.
