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The Zen of Quakerism (2016)

(www.friendsjournal.org)
124 points surprisetalk | 2 comments | 29 Jun 25 13:40 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bovermyer ◴[02 Jul 25 17:46 UTC] No.44446675[source]▶
That's an interesting parallel. I'll admit, I know almost nothing about Quakers and Quakerism.
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giraffe_lady ◴[02 Jul 25 18:27 UTC] No.44447174[source]▶
They're historically very interesting but you have to be careful about what you understand about contemporary quakers based on reading on the internet. Their traditions & cultural impact are attractive to a lot of people, who then write about it.

But quakerism as a living religion is extremely small and quite diverse for its tiny size, and groups practicing the traditional silent worship are a small minority even within that. The majority of living quakers experience a religion much closer to the main stream of evangelical christianity than you will expect from reading about it online. IIRC something like half of quakers are african.

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rimunroe ◴[02 Jul 25 18:33 UTC] No.44447252[source]▶
> But quakerism as a living religion is extremely small and quite diverse for its tiny size, and groups practicing the traditional silent worship are a small minority even within that. The majority of living quakers experience a religion much closer to the main stream of evangelical christianity than you will expect from reading about it online.

Could you elaborate on this? This is fairly surprising to me as someone raised as a Quaker and who still attends meeting occasionally despite being an atheist. While I’m aware of a few different sects within Quakerism, I’ve never heard of one which eschews silent worship. I haven’t ever personally encountered an evangelical Quaker, and the thought seems particularly strange to me.

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1. doom2 ◴[03 Jul 25 02:51 UTC] No.44451178{3}[source]▶
Many meetings associated with Friends United Meeting practice worship as a more "traditional" Christian church with a pastor. They associate with many other national and international Quaker organizations and have a majority of their members in countries like Kenya. Evangelical Friends Church is more like other evangelical Christian churches and does not associate with any other Quaker organization as far as I can tell.
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2. rimunroe ◴[03 Jul 25 15:19 UTC] No.44455947[source]▶
That’s wild! Though I guess it should be unsurprising that Quakerism diverges just like any other religion