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Religion and Spirituality ‹ Through the Flaming Sword ‹ Reader — WordPress.com

Religion and Spirituality ‹ Through the Flaming Sword ‹ Reader — WordPress.com



Religion and Spirituality

I want to make a case for Quakerism as a religion.
I suspect that many Friends prefer to think of their Quakerism as a spirituality rather than as a religion. For one thing, “religion” implies belief in God and beliefs in general, and for many of us, “belief in God” isn’t as straightforward as it was a generation or two ago.
Also, “religion” implies tradition, a legacy of beliefs and practices that one has had no part in shaping, leaving you to either accept or rebel against them; religion implies an authority in the community that in some ways supersedes one’s own individual preferences. By contrast, “spirituality” implies individualism—personal sovereignty over one’s own ideas, beliefs, and practices.
For many Friends (in the liberal tradition, at least), one of the most appealing aspects of Quakerism is this freedom to believe and practice what you wish. You can escape the constraints of religion, and for many of us those constraints have been enforced with abuse. Thus, for many Friends, joining a Quaker meeting means joining a group of like-minded people who accept that each of us is practicing our own form of spirituality. In this view, meeting for worship becomes, in essence, a form of group meditation.
For me, however, Quakerism is both a religion and a spirituality. Let me explain by trying to define spirituality and religion as integrally related.
For me, spirituality is the ideas, attitudes, emotions, and practices one embraces in order to align one’s inner life toward personal transformation and toward the transcendental and to align one’s outer life toward right living.
For me, religion is the collective spirituality practiced by a community. Religion is the ideas, attitudes, feelings, and practices the community embraces in order to align its inner life toward collective transformation and toward the transcendental (God—more about this in a moment), and to align the community’s outer life toward justice, peace, equality, earthcare, and service in the world.
For religious communities have a collective inner life, just as individuals have a personal inner life. (Some Friends, especially in the 18th century, called this collective inner spiritual life of the meeting the angel of the meeting, after Revelations, chapters two and three, which are letters written by Christ to the angels of the meetings of seven churches in Asia Minor.)
Actually, all communities have an inner life. Clubs, professional associations, businesses, municipalities—all these communities have some kind of inner life. But these communities are rarely self-conscious enough, self-reflective enough, small enough, or organized in such a way as to manifest a collective consciousness coherent enough to work with in a deliberate and meaningful way. These communities can still experience transformation. On very rare occasions, they can even experience the transcendental. And they can bend toward justice (or toward oppression) in their presence in the world.
But the thing about a religious community is that it’s designed to work with its collective consciousness. It’s designed to provide shape and context for the spirituality of the individuals who comprise its collective consciousness; but it also works directly at the collective level with ideas, attitudes, emotions, and practices that only the community as such can embrace.
For most religions, this direct attempt at collective faith and practice is limited to the worship service. Friends enjoy a number of other “venues” for collective spirituality in addition to worship: worship sharing groups, clearness committees, even committee work itself—we conduct all of our gatherings and discernment as meetings for worship, at least in theory, as shared tools for aligning our collective inner and outer lives.
What really makes Quakerism a religion, in my view, though, is that our practice of collective spirituality sometimes manifests in collective transcendental experience. We call this direct experience of God the gathered meeting. By “God” I mean here the Mystery Reality behind our experience of the gathered meeting. We may not be able to collectively articulate what that presence is very well—it’s a mystery. But we share the knowledge of its reality.
The direct experience and knowledge of that reality puts “belief in God” in a new light. We don’t believe in God as a matter of faith in a legacy or tradition of ideas. Rather, we know God collectively through direct experience. As individuals, we may elaborate in various ways on that immediate apperception of the divine which we’ve experienced in the gathered meeting for worship—we may have certain beliefs about what’s happened.
The community may do the same thing with its collective experience and develop a “theology”, as early Friends did, as a way of sharing the experience—with each other, with our children, with potential converts. But, for early Friends, such evangelizing did not aim at converting people to a set of beliefs, but at bringing them into that experience, bringing them into direct relationship with God. So also today, our theology, our ideas about what’s happening in our collective spiritual life as a meeting and as a movement, are only tools for pointing toward the Presence we experience in the gathered meeting and/or in our own hearts.
Thus Quakerism does have a tradition, it does have a legacy, and that legacy does include ideas, attitudes, feelings, and practices for the individual to practice as the Quaker way. But these are not as fully developed as in some other religions. This is mostly because we are so inwardly focused and have abandoned outward forms to such a thorough degree. We don’t light votive candles, pray rosaries, have stock hymns or a religious calendar lectionary. Technically speaking, we don’t even have a religious calendar at all. We don’t have a Benedictine Rule. We don’t have the formal elements of the Eightfold Path, breathing exercises and asanas, like yoga does.
Even to “turn toward the light” or to “sink down in the Seed”, favorite phrases of George Fox representing spiritual “practices”, are very ambiguous as actual practices; it’s taken Rex Ambler to “systematize” the former to some degree as a spiritual practice, and to my knowledge, no one has done this for sinking down into the Seed. And even Ambler’s Experiment with Light is a collective practice, as well as an individual one.
This leaves us as individuals free to hold onto any more fully developed spiritual practices we may have picked up from other traditions, as I have done myself. And we can take some of these with us into our collective Quaker practice; I use some of the same deepening techniques I use in my personal practice to deepen when I attend Quaker meeting for worship. These don’t just help me as an individual to experience worship more deeply; I think they deepen the collective worship, as well.
But the collective practices of the Quaker way are what make it a religion, because, through them, we come to know God in ways that are not possible for us as individuals, in ways that transform the community as community. These practices and these experiences are what make us a peculiar people of God—that is, a religion.
This post is getting pretty long. In the next one, I want to explore how the collective spiritual practice of a religious community is shaped by its founding collective, transcendental, spiritual experience; how the focus of the practice evolves as the community moves away from this foundational experience in time, through the generations; how this kind of evolution has shaped the legacy we have inherited as liberal Quakerism today; and what all this means for us.
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9 COMMENTS
  1. Something transcends, yet it’s accessible and well-disposed to us; that’s the whole point of the exercise.
    “Religion” has come to mean “ideas about that and what to do about it, with little or no direct interaction with what it is that transcends. People have come to consider such material worthless (to some extent rightly so), which was half the burden of the early Friends movement. (The other, larger half, which we’ve lost, was: “We’ve met what transcends; and so can you!”)
    “Experience” is the evidence; spirituality has come to mean the various practices intended to evoke such evidence.
    Contemporary Friends may have largely dumped the actual religious (ie meta-informational) part of their tradition, which doesn’t give them much rationale for what we do or anything much to say about what it means. We keep practicing the traditional spirituality, but can’t readily
    tell anyone else why they’d find it worthwhile.
    But maybe we need a better, less Puritan theological formulation… if only we dared say anything whatsoever without laboratory proof.
  2. I have two things to comment on: You state, “Even to “turn toward the light” or to “sink down in the Seed”, favorite phrases of George Fox representing spiritual “practices”, are very ambiguous as actual practices…” I have the works of Fox on my computer. (Scanned and run through OCR, so not error free.) Neither of these phrases, “turn toward the light” or “sink down in the Seed” are found in Fox’s Works, barring some error in my copy that obscures an occurrence. Can you substantiate your claim that these are “favorite phrases” of Fox?
    #2. Would you care to comment on the distinction between “believe in God” and “believe God”? What difference do those distinctions make in the life of the community?
    Thanks for any response
    1. Without knowing what Steve would say — I’m puzzled and intrigued by #2. No one who believed in God as traditionally described would expect God to be either mistaken or lying (although there is that incident in 1 Kings 22 where God indirectly deceives all of Ahab’s prophets except Micaiah, knowing that Ahab will believe them and get himself killed in battle.)
      So “believing God” shouldn’t be an issue; but ‘believing something one mistakenly believes that God means to say’ — That certainly can happen. And hence, disbelieving something God does intend to say, if one believes that isn’t God’s intended meaning.
      Given that finite beings and Infinite Being have somewhat different perspectives, a person might need to grow a whole new set of ears, might need years of Divine teaching to see a meaning he’s not yet prepared for. (People can take a very long time just coming to know and understand each other, let alone God.)
    2. I got the general idea of “stand still in the light” and “sink down in the seed” as “practices” from Doug Gwyn’s A Sustainable Life, for which this is a major theme. He specifically states this on page xxv. He quotes Fox saying “stand still in the light” on page 6, from Works, Vol 7, pp. 20–21: “And stand still in the Light, and submit to it, and the other will be hushed and gone; and then content[ment] comes.” See also Works, vol 4, pp. 17–18.
      He quotes Penington (not Fox) saying “sink down in the seed” on page 8: “Be no more than God hath made thee. Give over thine own willing; give over thine own running; give over thine own desiring to know or to be any thing, and sink down in the seed which God sows in the heart and let that grow in thee, and be in thee, and breathe in the, and act in thee, and thou shall find by sweet experience that the Lord know that, and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life, which is his portion.” (“Some Directions to the Panting Soul,” Works, vol 2, p. 205.
      Fox writes something very close to the phrase in the Journal (p. 437, Nickalls): Be still and wait in your own condition, and settled in the Seed of God that doth not change, that in that ye may feel dear Edward Burrough among you in the Seed . . . .”
      1. Thanks, Steve, for the clarification of the source of the quotes or not-quite-quotes as the case may be. Thanks for that precious quote from Fox regarding Edward Burrough. I am conscious of the cloud of witnesses that surround us today, whose presence may be felt in Christ, the Seed. I also found this in epistle 10, ¨And when temptations and troubles appear, sink down in that which is pure, and all will be hushed, and fly away. Your strength is to stand still, after ye see yourselves…¨
    3. As to “believe in God” and “believe God”, I never thought about that distinction before, and I’m not sure what to make of it.
      “Believe in God” has certain established connotations in the popular mind about believing that there is a transcendent, perhaps “supreme” being worthy of our worship. I suspect that most meetings in the programmed tradition share this belief and that most in the liberal tradition either don’t or feel they have to qualify it somehow; that’s how I feel.
      In theory, worshipping without a more or less universally shared “belief in God”, without having a being to worship, should have a profound effect on the truth and quality of the worship. In my experience, however, it doesn’t. At least not on my end, as a worshipper. Maybe it does on God’s end, if there is such a being.
      I have been to hundreds of worship services in which everybody agreed they were worshipping God in the traditional Christian understanding of God, and I never had a sense of God’s presence; whereas, I have felt “God” present in the gathered meetings for worship that I’ve participated in, in which there was no such consensus about the object of our worship or who or what “God” is.
      Several of those gathered meetings were meetings for business in worship, and we did “believe God”, in the sense that we knew we were being guided by the Holy Spirit and we followed.
      So it seems to me that what’s important for the worshipping community is not so much what you believe, but rather THAT you believe when you’re in the Presence.
      1. Steve and Forrest, thanks for your responses regarding the distinction between believe and believe in. My own journey in that regard began with noticing a difference in the wording of the conversation between Jesus and the Jews after feeding the 5,000 in John 6. My translation has Jesus state, ¨This is the work of God that you believe in him whom God has sent.¨ The Jews respond, ¨What works do you do that we should believe you?¨ These two statements do not connect for one is believe in (a static situation) while the other is believe (a dynamic relationship). My sense was corroborated when some friends pointed out that the Greek we translate as “believe in” has to do with “believe that one”; the “in” being the pointer. So in current practice of Christianity, to believe in God is/can be dramatically different than believe God. We can’t believe God if we don’t hear. And we don’t believe what we have heard if we secretly (or openly) keep another basket of eggs just in case this one breaks and all the eggs fall through.
        I have tried to articulate my understanding of this concept in my blog post, http://nffquaker.org/profiles/blogs/the-grammar-of-the-gospel.
    4. My understanding is that the Greek idiom ‘believe in’ was not about the existence of the person/whatever in question, but about a grant of authority.
      ie Josephus at one point asks a fellow Judean to “believe in me”, ie to follow his lead & accept his orders.
      So Jesus would be implying that his antagonists should give him the authority due one sent by God; they would be asking why they should believe his implied claim to be such a person.
      So far as anyone doesn’t believe something God is working to tell them, my own best guess is that sometimes people need a catastrophic Gestalt shift before they can fit a message into their worldview.
      1. Thanks for this insight. It fits in with my growing insight that much of the book of John has to do with establishing Jesus as the prophet like Moses whom we are to hear in all things. “This is the work of God that gains one the food which endures to eternal life that you believe/accept the authority of the one whom God has sent to teach you…” Also plug that concept into John 3:16 and it fits much better with the rest of the passage through verse what? 19 or 20 I think. OK, I better stop.

Quakers & Capitalism—The Book | Through the Flaming Sword



Quakers & Capitalism—The Book | Through the Flaming Sword



Quakers & Capitalism—The Book


This page features links to sections I’ve already written of my book on Quakers and Capitalism by that title. Note that since this is still a work in progress, there are notes here and there about content that still needs to be developed. In some of these areas, I have the research but haven’t done the writing yet. In others, I am hoping that some of my readers will be able to contribute. These notes appear in brackets.
Quakers and Capitalism

Introduction

The 1650s: The Lamb’s War and the Social Order

Transition (1661-1695): Persecution & Gospel Order

The Double-culture Period (1695-1895): The Double-Culture Period

Evangelicalism and Political Economy (the 1800s)

Second Transition (1895-1920): The Corporation, the Great War, Liberalism and the Social Order
Appendices

Quaker Contributions to Industrial Capitalism—A Summary

Foundations of a True Social Order

Seebohm Rowntree – A bibliography

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§ 12 Responses to Quakers & Capitalism—The Book
Marge Abbott
November 29, 2014 at 2:41 pm

Have you read Frederick Tolles “Meeting House and Counting House”? Another source is a book published decades ago by the Harvard Business School on Isaac Hicks, a NYC merchant who gave up a thriving business to travel as a companion to Elias Hicks.

Marge Abbott
Reply
Steven Davison
November 30, 2014 at 10:30 am

Thank you, Marge. Yes I have read Meeting House and Counting House, but not the book about Hicks. Sounds interesting.
Reply
Stephen McKernon
January 3, 2012 at 8:03 pm

Hi Stephen,

Happy New Year!

I’ve been fascinated by your blog and it has prompted me to do a whole bunch of self-challenging and self-education.

So, the obvious  I”m wondering when you are going to publish your book?

I am very interested in working with others to develop practical guides and resources for businesses. Is this something you are interested in, or do you know of others who share this interest?

Regards

Stephen
Reply
Steven Davison
January 6, 2012 at 1:54 pm

Hi, Stephen

Sorry it’s taken me a while to respond. I’m glad you find my blog useful. As for when I might publish, I don’t really know. I haven’t done much research on the history of Quaker economics in the 20th century and that could take a while. That is one of the reasons I started the blog, to get some of this material out there without having to wait until it was all ready. What I would really like is to find collaborators who have already done this research and include them as co-authors.

I am somewhat interested in practical business guides, though bigger picture macroeconomic issues interest me more. One little bit that I haven’t done with the research I’ve done so far is a more thorough treatment of Quaker innovations in business practice and labor relations during the 18th and 19th centuries. There’s quite a bit of material available, and I’ve even read most of it, but either didn’t take good notes or haven’t yet got to them. Also, George Fox wrote a rather detailed epistle to business people about their practice quite early on; I have the reference somewhere, but would have to did to find it.

There are some good and more contemporary pamphlets on business practice, which I’ve skimmed. And I’ve been communicating with a Friend who is very knowledgeable and personally active in labor relations. She is the person who could probably work with you most closely. Her name is Linda Lotz and her email address is llotz@hotmail.com. I think Linda is right that labor relations deserve more attention in our testimonies’ evolution and they would be a big part of a more enlightened testimony on business practice.

Well, I’ve hinted at a lot and not given you much that is substantive. Let’s keep corresponding and I’ll gather some resource references I think you might find useful.

And thanks again for reading and contacting me.

Steve
Reply
Stephen McKernon
January 8, 2012 at 12:10 am

Hi Steven,

Thanks for your comments and your generosity with information! I will follow through and keep you posted.

I could possibly help as an ‘assistant researcher’ or ‘second head’ on Quaker economics in the 20th century if that is of help. I’m a member of Quakers and Business (http://qandb.org/) and perhaps people there would be of help too?

Don’t worry about Foxe’s comments – I’ve found the most succinct are in letter 200 (e.g. see http://www.hallvworthington.com/Letters/gfsection9.html). And thanks for the referral to Linda.

My thinking at this stage is to focus on a guide and to that extent avoid overlapping with your work. This points to a focus on recent developments among Quakers and also those aligned with Quaker practice.

In the first instance, I will take a leaf from your book and start using a blog to map out ideas etc.

So once again, thanks for your initiative and energy with such a major task – and my best wishes (and possible help if needed) for the future!

Stephen
ernie weeks
November 4, 2012 at 9:11 pm

Stephen,

I’m a business professor at a small Appalachian university and might be interested in working a bit with you and exchanging ideas with you. Friends in the family for quite awhile, though we usually managed to get kicked out of meeting fairly regularly.

I would suggest looking to two early 20th century sources from the US.

First, Fredrick Taylor who was from a Quaker family – though I think adopted. Here you would have to go to the original sources as “Taylor ism” has less than a good name, but the thoughts and indications are clear…..Indeed, there is a direct line from this work to the sustainable economics writers such as Porter from Harvard who are developing value-chain and community models of business.

Another who you should not ignore is Hoover and his work in disaster relief, and policy changes. Again, a bad name so the orig. would serve you better than the historical revision.

For a general history of the NC Friends in the older days, Stephen Weeks = (also, adopted) is a reliable mid-century source for the period when Friends predominated in NC politics, and shortly thereafter. His work is probably available online. There is an excellent History professor at UT Chattanooga who probably has some interesting source material as well. I’m away from my research material so I can’t provide his name, but he did a quite readable history of Fox a few decades ago now.

Also, of course, the Chase family. There is an odd connection to duPont as well, but it is not direct and I’ve never run it down as to where their early management influences came from.

/ernie
Reply
Steven Davison
November 6, 2012 at 4:56 pm

Hi, Ernie

I know you responded to Stephen (at least I think so; because we sort of have the same name, there’s room for confusion), but I am grateful for your comments. I had forgotten that Taylor was a Friend, and I imagine that both he and Hoover (they knew each other didn’t they?) come from the same technocratic emergence within Progressivism.

I would dearly like to add material about both to my book. My problem is time. I’ve already spent years on this book and I’m already 65. I don’t suppose you would be interested in contributing would you? My solution to the time problem is to invite others to collaborate on bringing the work up through the 20th century.

Steven Davison
Stephen McKernon
November 14, 2012 at 11:55 pm

Hi Ernie and Steven,

Thanks for the referrals – I’m happy to scope stuff and pass it through to you, Steven, if this helps?

I’ll be a month or so as I’m completely snowed under at present – and will let you know when I’ve something to share.

And thanks again!

Stephen
KT
August 24, 2011 at 9:17 pm

I really enjoyed what you wrote so far. However, I did kind of lose it when you wrote about the spirit of capitalism. I don’t know if you read the World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. I could swear that he credited Quakers with helping to open up the New World for trading based on the close connections that the Quakers had. But when I have gone back and tried to find the passage to quote it, I can’t find it. It does fit with what you have written.
Reply
Steven Davison
August 25, 2011 at 8:28 am

Thanks for your comment, Karen. I’m glad you’re enjoying my work so far.

I did skimp on the development of Max Weber’s ideas in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as they relate to Friends and their economic history. He wrote a whole book on the topic and referred often to Quakers to illustrate his argument, and I condensed the whole thing down to a few paragraphs. I feel the subject deserves more attention and maybe I’ll return to it with more effort in the future. In the meantime, I’ll review what I have written and see if I can make it clearer and more compelling. Thanks for the feedback.

As for Quakers and New World trade, this is another area that I’ve not studied yet in depth, but I would not be surprised if your memory of Friedman is correct. Penn’s colony was settled quite early in our history and once it was granted by the king in the 1680s—still quite early—the connections with the mother country quickly became the best in the colonies. And the Quaker transatlantic network was extremely valuable. Most other shipping ventures took a 30% loss for granted: theft, damage, graft, piracy, and of course, shipwreck, all took their toll. But, between Friends, many of these problems were minimized and the reliable profitability of trade helped make Friends rich while creating one of the earliest and biggest and most efficient pipelines for goods and money between England and America.

I think I touch on this in one of my posts, but like everything else, there’s a lot more to say.

Thanks again for your interest.
Reply
Paulette Meier
January 22, 2011 at 10:46 pm

Dear Stephen,

I happened to notice your blog on a Facebook posting and am thrilled to find it. Just read the introduction and first chapter of your proposed book, and I’m appreciating so much what you’re laying out. You’re addressing questions I’ve had since becoming a Quaker, as well as some of my inner longing as a Friend to be more connected with economic justice activists who challenge and critically analyze contemporary capitalism.
I don’t have the time to read a lot or to engage with others around all this much right now, but I’m so glad you’re writing this. Perhaps later this spring I will organize a short term study group at my meeting to read what you’ve written.

In Friendship,

Paulette Meier
Reply
Steven Davison
January 23, 2011 at 9:06 am

Thanks, Paulette. Stay tuned. There’s more to come, albeit slowly.

Steven
Reply

Spirituality vs Religion, Meditation vs Worship ‹ Through the Flaming Sword ‹



Spirituality vs Religion, Meditation vs Worship ‹ Through the Flaming Sword ‹ Reader — WordPress.com


Spirituality vs Religion, Meditation vs Worship
2d ago


One of the signature characteristics of our time is that many people have a spiritual life, or they want one, but fewer and fewer people want a religion. This trend has been working its way into Quaker culture, as well.

Years ago, I was a friendly adult presence at a Quaker high school conference. In one of the exercises, the facilitator designated one end of the room “spirituality” and the other end “religion” and we were invited to place ourselves along the spectrum. There was a crowd at the spirituality end, a sizable group just left of center toward spirituality, stragglers thinned steadily out toward religion—and then there was me. I’ve always had a religious temperament. I have experienced this phenomenon many times among us since.

The result of this trend in liberal Quakerism is that many Friends and attenders treat meeting for worship as group meditation, “an hour in which to find your truth”, as the A-frame placard says which my meeting puts on the sidewalk outside our entrance. This is an invitation to meditate, not an invitation to worship.

Nothing against meditation, mind you. I’ve been trained in several kinds of meditation, and I practice my own mash-up form all the time. And I’ve been in several satsangs that practice group meditation, which are great. But they’re not worship.

Meditation takes you deeper into yourself. Worship takes you out of yourself. Worship is more like listening to music than like listening to the “still, small voice” within. Worship is paying attention to something that transcends self.

Of course, one transcends one’s self in deep meditation, also; and the “something” we attend to in worship is within us, too, yes. That’s why centering is the first stage in worship. The door to worship is within us.

But that something we seek in worship is not just within me; it’s within all of us in the meeting room. And more to the point, it’s within us—as an us, as a collective consciousness. There’s a “that of God” in the collective consciousness of the gathered worshippers, just as there’s a “that of God” (whatever that means) in each one of us.

When we find ourselves in a gathered meeting for worship, we know that this transcendental something I’m referring to is real, and not just a facet or manifestation or dweller in my own individual consciousness. We come out of worship spilling over with joy, and looking around, we see that our fellow worshippers are filled with that same joy themselves. We have shared the joy of gathering in the Spirit.

I think of that gathering spirit as the spirit of Christ. Not necessarily the spirit of the risen Jesus, which traditional Christians infer from their reading of Christian scripture; that seems rather unlikely to me, metaphysically speaking, and certainly not objectively verifiable but only for one’s self alone through personal experience.

Rather, what I call the spirit of Christ is the spirit of anointing, the spirit that Jesus invoked in Luke 4:18–21, quoting Isaiah 61:1–2—the spirit that descended on him at his baptism, the spirit that descended on the apostles at the Pentecost, the spirit that descended on the first gathered “Quaker” meeting at Firbank Fell when George Fox convinced the Seekers, the spirit that Friends have been gathered in as a people of God ever since.

I experience that spirit is an emergent communion of a collective consciousness that is fully focused on the transcendental Mystery that dwells in the midst of the gathered worshipping community (and in the midst of each worshipper’s soul). For sure, it may be more than “emergent”; that spirit may have identity, sentience, and presence independent of the gathered worshipping community. For all I know, it’s the spirit of the risen Jesus.

However, while the worshippers rise from such a meeting knowing that, yes, that was it, that was covered in the Holy Spirit, in none of the gathered meetings I’ve experienced has anyone, let alone the whole gathered body, risen up and said, Ah! Yes, there he was, that was the risen Jesus. So inference as to the Spirit’s preexistence or independence or sovereign identity is, for me, just speculation. I know it’s real; its identity and its other qualities, are yet a mystery; to me at least.

So why call it the spirit of Christ? Because doing so reconnects us with our tradition and at the same time pulls our tradition forward, and because Christ is uniquely and truthfully descriptive. For “Christ” is a title for a consciousness, not the last name of a historical person. “Christ” means “anointed”, anointed of God as Spirit for some work. And, in the gathered meeting, have we not just been anointed by the spirit, just like Isaiah was in chapter 61 verse 1, and just as Jesus was in Luke 4:15–31? “Christ” is the awareness that one has been anointed for some divine work and the consciousness through which one is empowered for the work. For Jesus in Luke 4, the “work” was “good news for the poor”, a ministry of debt relief through radical reliance on the providing spirit of God and radical inter-reliance within the worshipping community for its execution.

And for us? For what work have we been anointed? Or have we, in truth, been anointed in the Spirit in the first place? Do we, in truth, worship? Or are we “just” meditating?

Steven Davison

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2 COMMENTS

treegestalt
2d ago


What I intend in Meeting is ‘prayer’, ie to be knowingly present with and interacting with God. ‘Meditating’ can help move me in the right direction for that — but anything else can happen, instead, including riding a long train of thought into senseless (to me, anyway) dreaming.

God communicates _in_ experiences, not necessarily in words (& not necessarily without them.) But what I’m needing to ‘hear’ in Meeting or private prayer tends to be beyond me. Like ‘growing up’, I can’t expect it to arrive at any given moment. Typically, a long period of frustrated bewilderment has to be trudged through before arriving at an “Oh!”

I too am disturbed by the prevalence of Theophobia in contemporary culture, particularly in our Meetings. (But the absence of God, if that were even possible, would be far scarier. People think they’re living perfectly well without God — but only because of confused notions of what God is…) But while that renders Meetings a little bit lame, such Meetings still serve well as bridges to God.
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Bill Samuel
2d ago


Early Friends would have been aghast at that sign outside the so-called “meeting for worship.” They didn’t believe in a different truth for each person.

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Doug Hamilton Not necessarily, only by typology if inward.
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John Jeremiah Edminster I've been pondering that, too, David, especially since Steven Davison posted his blog post on it. I think it depends on the will of the worshiper and the will of the Lord: of the worshiper, in that if I love my fellow worshipers and want them, too, to experience contact with God, then it's worship. And the will of the Lord, in that if He wills that we "meditators" experience His gathering us together, then it becomes worship as we receive His gift.


Chuck Fager I’ll have to think about it.
     David William McKay  You might even meditate on it.


Jim Fussell Worship is by a community, while meditation is individual, yes?
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Joe Snyder Interesting question, easily sidetracked by semantics. 
I believe one can engage in worship alone physically, so I'm not convinced the community vs individual works. 
It may be a matter of degree, but my sense is that worship is more about a surrender of self to Christ, God (dare I say Spirit without an article? there are so many out there), either or both individually or corporately. 
Meditation seems more about one's individual state of mind, more about receiving inspiration than surrendering self. 
There is a difference I see between quieting self and surrendering self. But these are not hard and fast distinctions, just how it relates to my experience as one who started out a meditater and am now more of a worshiper.
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Rich Accetta-Evans Worship can be meditative and meditation can be worshipful, so the distinction can seem subtle.

Less subtle and more important is the distinction between a Meeting for Worship and a group assembled to meditate.
In a Meeting for Worship we seek to be present together in the presence of God and to be gathered together by God's Spirit. 
That is very different than merely sitting together in the same room while everyone seeks his or her own inner quiet or state of mindfulness.

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MORE IN THROUGH THE FLAMING SWORD

Religion and Spirituality
I want to make a case for Quakerism as a religion. I suspect that many Friends prefer to think of their Quakerism as a spirituality rather than as a religion. For one thing, “religion” implies belief in God and beliefs in general, and for many of us, “belief in God” isn’t as straightforward as it was a generation or two ago. Also, “religion” implies tradition, a legacy of beliefs and practices that one has had no part in shaping, leaving you to either accept or rebel against them; religion implies an authority in the community that in some ways supersedes one’s own individual preferences. By contrast, “spirituality” implies individualism—personal sovereignty over one’s own ideas, beliefs, and practices.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? —
 Spirituality vs Religion
Religion as Corporate Spirituality My one-line answer to the question, What is Quakerism for? is: bringing people to G*d and bringing G*d into the world. “Bringing people to G*d” has two parts: personal spirituality and communal spirituality. The last post’s discussion of worship provides a segue from personal spirituality to communal spirituality—that is, to religion. Several years ago I was a Friendly Adult Presence in a youth conference sponsored by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and in one of the exercises, the young people were asked to sort themselves out by whether they had a spiritual life or not and whether they practiced a religion. The vast majority said yes to spirituality and no to religion. This made me feel bad.



06 Quakers and Capitalism - Steven Dale Davison

Quakers and Capitalism - Steven Dale Davison

Quakers and Capitalism

At the World Conference of Friends held at Guilford College in North Carolina in 1967, some young Friends crossed over from a concurrently running young Friends conference to raise a concern that became known as Right Sharing of World Resources. The new concern recognized poverty in the world economic system as in part a systemic problem, and as a legacy of colonialism. In doing so, Right Sharing went beyond the venerable concern Quakers have always had for their relationship with money, as individuals and as meetings.
In this way, Right Sharing also echoed the key testimonial innovation of the first Friends World Conference, held in London in 1920—the Foundations of a True Social Order. London Yearly Meeting had brought these eight principles to the Conference from their own landmark sessions of 1918, when the yearly meeting had deliberated over the report of its War and the Social Order Committee. Convened in 1915 to explore the causes of the Great War, the committee had concluded that colonial capitalism was in large part responsible for the horrors they had just been through.
They seem rather mild and general today (and in fact, the original proposal from the committee had been more radical), but the Foundations represented a momentous break with the past 250 years of Quaker testimony on the economy when they were approved. Not since the 1650s had Friends corporately addressed economics as a system so clearly and deliberately. Even in the 1650s, early Friends saw the complete restructuring of the social order as part of the Lamb’s War and what Doug Gwyn has called the “apocalypse of the word”—the feeling that they were witnesses for the Second Coming of Christ. They expected that all social institutions would be transformed along with the church when the “war” had been “won.”
But with the restoration of the monarchy in 1661, the onset of the persecutions shortly after (lasting until the 1690s), and the imprisonment and death of most of their leadership, Friends gave up their apocalyptic expectations of seeing all things (including the social order) made new, and their zeal for shaking things to their roots. George Fox brought Gospel Order to Quaker meetings, remaking Quaker institutional life with an innovative approach to Spirit‐led discipline. And, as Doug Gwyn has described in The Covenant Crucified, Quakers struck a deal with the system: religious toleration from the state, privatization of faith by the Church. The state gave up control over private worship; and religious communities, including Friends, gave up radical claims on the social order.
So began what I like to call the “double culture” period in Quaker history. On the one hand, Friends withdrew from the world into quietism and their “distinctives”; on the other hand, they engaged with the world with incredible energy and creativity as innovators in business, science, and technology. They almost single‐handedly launched the industrial revolution, developing all the key technologies that made it possible, creating whole new industries and the leading companies in those industries, and reshaping the economy to its roots.
They revived the iron industry, invented coke as a fuel, and perfected cast iron; then moved into steel, inventing cast steel; then the railroad, interchangeable parts, household goods as consumer commodities, the department store, English porcelain, hot chocolate, the coffee house, and more. They built whole new industries besides iron, steel, and porcelain: lead, zinc, and silver mining; confections; soap; pharmaceuticals; watch and clock making; canal and rail transport. They dominated the textile industry (woolens, anyway) and became major players in shipping and finance (Barclays, Lloyds, and the Bank of Norwich, to name three banks). The key breakthroughs were high‐quality steel and steel casting, which made it possible to mass‐produce machine parts, the piece necessary for the industrial revolution to take off.
And they did all this with a surprising lack of reflection and theory about the creature to which they were midwives.
Three individual Quakers stand out as notable exceptions—John Bellers in the early 1700s, David Ricardo in the early 1800s, and Seebohm Rowntree at the turn of the 20th century.
In contrast to John Woolman (a true quietist in that he mostly directed his energies in A Plea for the Poor and other writings inward, toward his own community and toward the Christ within his readers), John Bellers (1654–1725) sent his ideas to Parliament. Bellers was the first to propose institutional remedies for the terrible plight of the newly emerging social class of industrial workers: colleges of art and industry. These institutions combined workhouses for the poor with vocational‐technical schools, for‐profit businesses, and industrial research institutes. He is quoted verbatim in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and was required reading in the Soviet Union, which makes him perhaps the third‐best‐known Friend in history, after William Penn and Herbert Hoover (I’m not counting Richard Nixon).
A hundred years later, David Ricardo (1772–1823) founded the classical school of economics with his landmark 1815 essay On Profits. Born Jewish, Ricardo emigrated to England from Holland and became a Friend when he married his Quaker wife. After making a fortune in the stock market, he retired and turned his extraordinary mind to the problems of governing the emerging new economy. Classical economists like Ricardo, Adam Smith (the first economist), and John Stuart Mill held chairs in moral philosophy, but their approach to political economy was a secular counterweight to the evangelical political economists like Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) and Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), who dominated the new field until at least the mid‐19th century. Joseph John Gurney wrote a book about Chalmers and helped him lobby against the Poor Laws in Ireland.
As evangelicals, these men saw the economy as one aspect of God’s providential governance of the world. Market downturns and bankruptcies were God’s chastisements for corporate and individual sins. Poverty was the result of moral character and thus the cure for poverty was repentance and conversion. They supported laissez faire (deregulation) because they believed humans had no business interfering with God’s judgment. They opposed state‐sponsored, tax‐based welfare because they thought it encouraged idleness and the other bad moral character traits that were the cause of poverty in the first place, and because it interfered with individual responsibility for one’s own soul, both as giver and receiver of moral exhortation. They believed that voluntary personal philanthropy, not reform of the system, more effectively served the real (spiritual) needs of both the philanthropist and the pauper. Evangelical moral philosophy dominated political economic thinking, public policy, and popular social attitudes in Great Britain until the terrible suffering of the Irish famine of 1846–1852 made people question its assumptions about God’s invisible hand in the economy. Philanthropy remained the characteristic response to the harshness of industrial capitalism throughout the Victorian period.
In the 1890s, Seebohm Rowntree helped to decisively overthrow this conservative evangelical emphasis on individual responsibility and private philanthropy with his book Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901). A statistical sociological study of his hometown, York, the book proved scientifically that most poor people actually worked—and that low wages, not bad character (that is, sin), were the cause of their poverty. (The irony was that, along with the railroad, his own family’s chocolate company was the only employer of note in the city.) A young Winston Churchill called it “a book which has fairly made my hair stand on end.” David Lloyd George brandished the book before large crowds all over Great Britain campaigning for the New Liberalism that had been inaugurated in 1906. Poverty helped pave the way for Britain’s revolutionary general welfare programs—for the modern welfare state—and, among Friends, for the work of the War and Social Order Committee, the Foundations of a True Social Order, and the social witness theme for the first Friends World Conference. Rowntree himself had a long career in the Liberal government as a protagonist of land reform, and his work reached deep into the 20th century to help shape President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” which used his methods to define the poverty line and eligibility for Head Start and other anti‐poverty programs under the newly formed Office of Equal Opportunity.
Kenneth Boulding (1910–1993), who reintegrated economic thinking with ethical, religious, and ecological concerns in the 20th century, should also be mentioned. Anticipating the rise of eco‐economics by decades, Boulding questioned economic assumptions on ecological grounds in 1958. He was one of the first analysts of the knowledge economy, and he worked tirelessly to integrate all the social sciences into one conversation about social betterment. One might also include Herbert Hoover, who botched the response to the crash of 1929, and Jack Powelson, who is an ardent defender of globalization and of economic development on the Western model.
All of these people were political economists. That is, they pondered the relationships between the economy, politics, and public policy, and they proposed policies, government measures, and market innovations that they believed would best serve the public good. And these people were Quakers whose faith informed their practice of the “dismal science.”
So, Friends have quite a rich history of both faith and practice regarding capitalism as a system. With Rowntree and his fellow reformers, including a small but influential group of socialists centered in Manchester, British Friends caught up with Marx (and Bellers), recognizing the structural economic inequities (if not oppression) of capitalism, and responding with government programs. I’ve not yet discovered much political economic thinking among American Friends at the turn of the century. This reflects, I think, the enormous economic power of British Friends going into the 20th century compared to a much smaller minority of U.S. Friends, who had never played a similar role in the development of the U.S. economy.
Then came World War I, and Friends Service Council, American Friends Service Committee, and Friends World Conference. With the Great War as background, the Foundations of a True Social Order articulated a new vision for the capitalist system—what its motivations, goals, and methods should be—and they expressed a yearning for justice, peace, and the relief of suffering. England’s welfare state, Roosevelt’s New Deal, the New Society, and the War on Poverty of the 1960s all continued in the vein of compassionate political economics as defined by Rowntree.
However, beginning with the Reagan administration and intensifying with the George W. Bush administration, the political economics of poverty have retreated again to the conservative evangelical worldview that favors faith‐based programs very like the ones Thomas Chalmers developed in the 1820s, and a moral economic ideology that stresses personal responsibility and the transformation of character as the cure for poverty. And the political economics of business has taken the simple laissez faire philosophy of Ricardo and other early classical economists to a new extreme: radical deregulation of virtually every industry and privatization of even such traditional government functions as public education, incarceration, and warfare.
So where are we as Friends today?
I would like us to build on the legacy of the apocalyptic Friends of the 1650s, and of Bellers, Rowntree, and Boulding. I would have us strive for an integrated social testimony that fuses our religious witness into a coherent, comprehensive vision for complete social transformation.
I am hoping for modern radical Quaker political economists—because the world needs a compassionate counterbalance to the thinking that dominates both corporate practice and government policy. It needs Quakers to get involved because political economics since the 1980s has been a creature, in part, of religion: conservative evangelical Christian theological assumptions, especially about the causes of poverty and its solutions, have become political ideology and public policy. We already know what conservative economics leads to from its history in the 1800s and from the changes visible today: the Corn Laws and Poor Laws of the 1820s, and the initial response to the Irish famine in the 1840s were disastrous for the poor. Today we have the assault on the dispossessed victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as the authors of their own suffering and the gutting of the very programs that would minister to their needs. This calls for engagement by religious people who have a more perceptive and faithful knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus and a more universal understanding of grace and the role of religious community.
Finally, Quakers should become political economists because capitalism—especially industrial capitalism—is itself partly our responsibility. Just as we helped to create the modern prison system with the innovation of the penitentiary, so Quakers were the driving force behind the industries and economic structures that shaped emerging industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism would have happened without Friends—but it didn’t. Just as we feel called to reform a penal system that has lost its way, so I hope we will be called to reform an economic system we did much to create and which has become carcinomic, an engine of unlimited consumption and growth, not to mention the blood on its hands, from the Western Front in World War I to the streets of Baghdad.
The problem is daunting to the point of paralysis. How do you change an entire economic system the way Quakers and other industrialists did 300 years ago?
First, of course, you pray and seek God’s guidance. We believe that any one of us may be called into ministry—to do something good for the world. Some among us, I pray, will be called into economic ministry, as Kenneth Boulding was. Beyond this, I have three more ideas that meetings might take up.
To begin with, we could start with our comfort zone, the Peace Testimony. Let’s develop a testimony on economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy. We know how devastating they have been to the people of nations we are punishing, and we know they often fail to meet their political goals. Economic sanctions have been around for quite a while and there is a lot of research to inform our work. Sanctions may be useful in some circumstances, but they desperately require informed and conscience‐led reform.
Second, again inside our comfort zone—but not for long—is the problem of secure retirement. Friends already have a track record of successful innovation with retirement communities, assisted living, hospices, and long‐term care. But our institutions on the model of Medford Leas are beyond the means of most people, including most Quakers. And a lot of people of means will soon be outliving the means that make these places affordable to them now. In the next 20 years, many of us are going to fall into poverty in our old age. Let’s start thinking, planning, experimenting with ways to meet this looming need.
Third, a simple way to restructure the problem, especially for religious communities, is to start by redefining “the good life.” The “American Dream” turns into a nightmare when extrapolated into the future, especially if it’s adopted by China, India, and the rest of the developing world. The planet just cannot support billions of people living as we do. That means we have to live with less. It means radical change and sacrifice.
The question then becomes: are we Quakers like the rich young man in the Gospels who asks Jesus, “What must I do to enter the kingdom of heaven?” Jesus answers with the essentials of the law, stressing the Ten Commandments. The young man says he already does these things. “One thing remains,” says Jesus. “You must sell all that you own and give it to the poor, and come follow me.” And the man went away, very sad, because he was a man of great wealth. Will we walk away, sad, but unable to take the last radical step?
Right now, few of us know the one‐third of U.S. children now living in poverty. But that may be about to change. Friends have gone through three stages of social status. We started out as yeoman farmers and small family tradespeople in the 1650s. By the mid‐1700s, most British Quakers were in the upper and upper middle classes. U.S. Friends were more generally distributed on the social landscape and have remained so ever since, but they were not usually poor. Then, in Great Britain during the 20th century, the great Quaker fortunes dissolved as privately owned companies went public and their Quaker owners became managers. Demographically, we Quakers have converged on the middle‐middle class from both ends throughout the past 100 years. This trend accelerated in the period following World War II, as new, more suburban meetings have sprung up in and near university towns.
Now I believe we may be on the cusp of a fourth stage, one of descent into poverty through the cracks in the floor of the middle class. The knowledge economy will increasingly leave behind those of us who are “stuck” in the service, education, and social service sectors—the so‐called secular church. Our real incomes have been stagnant for two decades already. And many of us are about to retire. Baby boomers (I am one) are very likely to outlive our savings and our safety net is fraying.
This will bring a new challenge to our meetings—a potential for intergenerational conflict. Retiring boomers will leave behind in our meetings younger families struggling to keep afloat with both parents working. As the ranks of the long‐lived elderly swell, these younger people may come to resent our incredible wastefulness, imprudence, selfishness, and our political power as a voting bloc, not to mention the economic burden of supporting both us and the debt we have amassed.
What are we going to do about that? And about all the people who are poor or over‐extended already?
Steven Dale Davison, a member of Yardley (Pa.) Meeting, is currently working on two books: a new reading of the Gospel with a focus on ecological issues, and an economic history of Friends and a history of Quaker economics, with some thoughts toward a Quaker economic testimony.
Posted in: Features

2019/12/29

The planning of microdistricts in post-war North Korea: space, power, and everyday life: Planning Perspectives: Vol 32, No 2



The planning of microdistricts in post-war North Korea: space, power, and everyday life: Planning Perspectives: Vol 32, No 2


The planning of microdistricts in post-war North Korea: space, power, and everyday life
Mina Kim &Inha Jung
Pages 199-223 | Received 08 Jun 2016, Accepted 10 Jun 2016, Published online: 08 Sep 2016

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https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2016.1221769

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ABSTRACT


In the 1950s, the Soviet Union and other communist countries developed a unique method for allowing socialist ideology to manifest in urban spaces. 

The theory of the microdistrict was invented to establish self-contained urban units that included both housing and public amenities and resulted in a tremendous change in the planning of communist cities. 

Because microdistricts satisfied the communities’ social requirements and facilitated mass-produced urban housing, the North Korean regime enthusiastically appropriated the microdistrict concept to fit its own reality.

 This theory has been applied to the country’s urban projects since 1955, a time when the urban population grew rapidly and construction boomed. The design and construction of microdistricts reflected North Korea’s power relation and substantially impacted everyday life. Thus, to more thoroughly understand post-war North Korean society and its urban planning principles, the microdistrict theory should be carefully examined. In light of this historical background, this paper analyses urban projects that were designed based on this theory and explores the impact of the microdistrict theory on the structure of large cities in North Korea.

A Brief History of the Moravian Daily Texts | Moravian Church Of North America



A Brief History of the Moravian Daily Texts | Moravian Church Of North America



A Brief History of the Moravian Daily Texts




“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.” Lamentations 3:22,23

The first printed edition of the Daily Texts (Losungen) was published in Herrnhut, Saxony, in 1731. The title page of that edition quoted the passage from Lamentations and promised a daily message from God that would be new every morning. It was an outgrowth of a spiritual renewal of the Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum) that dated from August 13, 1727.

In 1722 refugees from Bohemia and Moravia began arriving at the estate of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760), where he gave them a welcome and land on which to establish the settlement of Herrnhut (“Watch of the Lord”).

Visit store.moravian.org to order this year’s Moravian Daily Texts

Each day the settlers came together for morning and evening devotions, consciously placing their lives in the context of God’s Word. On May 3, 1728, during the evening service, Count Zinzendorf gave the congregation a “watchword” for the next day. It was to be a “Losung” (watchword) to accompany them through the whole day.

Thereafter one or more persons of the congregation went daily to each of the 32 houses in Herrnhut to bring them the watchword for the day, and engage the families in pastoral conversations about the text.

From this oral tradition, the Daily Texts soon became fixed in printed form. Zinzendorf compiled 365 watchwords for the year and the first edition of the Losungen was published for 1731.

Even in the first editions there appeared the characteristic coupling of a Bible verse and hymn stanza. Zinzendorf called the hymns “collects” and considered them to be the answer of the congregation to the Word of God. The Daily Texts would be a great deal poorer without the mixture of God’s Word and our human response.

The watchword soon became accompanied by a “doctrinal” text. The idea of an additional text grew out of a number of collections of texts from the Bible that were put together by Zinzendorf. Such additional lists (some of them for children) were used for special study within the groups in the community, and they came to be referred to as doctrinal texts.

For the Daily Texts, as for the whole Moravian Church, Count Zinzendorf’s death (May 9, 1760), was a turning point. His co-workers sensed the uniqueness of Zinzendorf’s watchwords, textbooks, and lessons and had them published at Barby-on-the-Elbe in a four-volume collection 1762.

From then on the watchwords and doctrinal texts are distinguished by the way they are selected each year. The watchwords are chosen from various verse collections and, since 1788, they have been drawn by lot from a collection of around 2,000 suitable Old Testament texts. The doctrinal texts are not chosen by lot but are selected. The difference between the watchwords and doctrinal texts was explained in 1801 as follows: “The watchword is either a promise, an encouragement, an admonition or word of comfort; the doctrinal text contains a point of revealed doctrine.”

By 1812 it was established that all watchwords would be drawn by lot from a selection of Old Testament texts, and the doctrinal texts would be selected from the New Testament. By the end of the nineteenth century, the custom was established to relate the two texts in theme or thought.


North American editions

The printing of the Daily Texts in North America dates back at least to 1767, when the Losungen was printed “at Bethlehem on the Forks of the Delaware by Johan Brandmuller.” The printer’s imprint bears the date of 1767 as well and may have been an extra printing for the German version done at Barby-on-the-Elbe in Germany, where most of the printing was done for the Moravian Church those days.

During the crucial days of the Revolution, the German-language edition was printed in Philadelphia by Heinrich Miller, who had worked for Benjamin Franklin when he first came to America. The daily text for July 4, 1776, was from Isaiah 55:5-“Behold, you shall call nations that you know not, and nations that knew you not shall run to you” (RSV).

English versions were printed in London as early as 1746, and the title page bears the imprint of “James Hutton near the Golden Lion in Fetter Lane.” Hutton was the well-known London printer associated with the Moravian Church who was a friend of John and Charles Wesley in the formative years of their ministry.

The 1850s were crucial years for the Moravian Church in North America as the congregations established in the United States broke away from direct control from the Moravian headquarters in Europe. Both German and English editions of the Daily Texts were regularly printed in Philadelphia or Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and in a few years the custom was established to include the statistics of the provinces and districts of the Moravian Church in North America.

The biblical texts for each day are chosen in Herrnhut, Germany, and then sent around the world to those who prepare the different language editions. Since 1959 the edition published in the United States has included a prayer for each day. For this North American edition, the hymns are chosen or written, and the prayers are written by Moravian clergy and laypersons from the United States and Canada. Each month is prepared by a different individual or couple, of a variety of ages, so that the prayers reflect the great diversity of devotion in the Moravian Church.

Visit store.moravian.org to order this year’s Moravian Daily Texts

The physical form of the Daily Texts varies considerably from country to country. Some, like this North American edition, have a separate page for the verses, hymns, and prayers of each day. Others have several days’ texts printed on one page, which makes a thin, pocket-size volume. Some are beautiful examples of the printing and bookbinding arts. Others are simply mimeographed and stapled together.

These external nonessentials pale beside the fact that this little book is probably the most widely read devotional guide in the world, next to the Bible. It forms an invisible bond between Christians on all continents, transcending barriers of confession, race, language, and politics. In its quiet way it performs a truly ecumenical service for the whole of Christendom.
62 languages and countingToday, the Moravian Daily Texts appear in 62 languages worldwide. In 2017, three new languages were added to the large number of editions of the Moravian Daily Texts: Syriac Aramaic, Tok Pisin (a language spoken in Papua New Guinea) and Vietnamese.Local church groups, often working with partners in Germany, took the initiative to translate, publish and distribute their version of the Moravian Daily Texts. All three projects received a start-up grant from the Moravian Church in Germany. The Vietnamese Daily Text book is published in two biannual installments. The Daily Texts from Papua New Guinea are printed in a print-run of 500 copies under the title: “Givim Mipela Kaikai Bilong Dispela De” (Give Us Today Our Daily Bread). The Syriac Aramaic version is still in translation.

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