Messages

  • We Bear our Testimony Against All Strife

    “We are a people that follow after those things that make for peace, love and unity; it is our desire that others’ feet may walk in the same, and do deny and bear our testimony against all strife, and wars, and contentions that come from the lusts that war in the members, that war in the soul, which we wait for, and watch for in all people, and love and desire the good of all… Treason, treachery, and false dealing we do utterly deny; false dealing, surmising, or plotting against any creature upon the face of the earth, and speak the truth in plainness, and singleness of heart.”

  • War Will End when People Grow Better

    “To end war and violence means having a better world, but that is impossible unless the people in it grow better. No relationship is finer than the people who compose it. Those who are endeavoring to abolish war, therefore, must themselves strive hard to become better people by living better lives.”

  • How to Achieve Peace

    “To the extent that the blessing of peace is achieved by humankind, it will not be achieved because people have outraced each other in the building of armaments, nor because we have outdebated each other with words, nor because we have outmaneuvered each other in political action, but because more and more people in a silent place in their hearts are turned to those eternal truths upon which all right living is based. It is on the inner drama of this search that the unfoldment of the outer drama of history ultimately depends.”

  • Peace Does Not Come Through Passivity

    “Adherence to the peace testimony grows out of our experience of God’s transforming love. It grows out of our ongoing life of prayer and worship which nurtures our relationship with Christ. But it also grows out of our obedience to the prophetic call of Christ to follow his will in faithful living in the world.”

  • Take Away the Occasion of All Wars

    “The time of my commitment to the house of correction being very near out, and there being many new soldiers raised, the commissioners would have made me captain over them; and the soldiers cried, they would have none but me. So the keeper of the house of correction was commanded to bring me before the commissioners and soldiers in the market place; where they offered me that preferment, as they called it, asking me, if I would not take up arms for the commonwealth against Charles Stuart?”

  • Centering the Voices Our Government Is Trying to Silence

    “The rights and safety of women and people with marginalized gender identities in the United States are in a precarious place. Women’s right to bodily autonomy was revoked with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, leaving a hodgepodge of inconsistent and ambiguous state laws in its place. Now under the new administration, transgender and nonbinary people are being targeted, with their very legal existence being erased by executive order. That’s why I felt it was critical to spend this month centering the voices of people our government is trying so hard to silence.”

  • Quakers on Peace and Nonviolence

    May 2025: This month’s theme is Peace and Nonviolence, learning from great Quaker activists of the past and present. We will read about how the testimony was formed in the earliest days of Quakerism, how Friends have struggled with it, and personal journeys of Friends in wartime.

  • There Is So Much Yet to Be Done

    “If I could live another century! I do so want to see the fruition of the work for women in the past century. There is so much yet to be done, I see so many things I would like to do and say, but I must leave it for the younger generation. We old fighters have prepared the way, and it is easier than it was fifty years ago when I first got into the harness. The young blood, fresh with enthusiasm and with all the enlightenment of the twentieth century, must carry on the work.”

  • People Who Think That Women Have No Souls

    “The notion that ‘God in every man’ applies equally to women stems from the earliest days of Quakerism.

    As early as 1646, George Fox wrote in his journal: ‘I came upon a sort of people who held that women have no souls, adding in a light manner, “no more than a goose.” But I reproved them, and told them that was not right; for Mary said, “my soul doth magnify the Lord.”‘

    Not long after, he challenged a priest who would not permit a woman to speak in a church. ‘For the woman asking a question, he ought to have answered it, having given liberty for any to speak.'”

  • The Difficulty of Naming the Divine

    “I’ve yet to find a term that describes how I feel about the divine. ‘The Spirit’ comes close, and so, sometimes, does ‘Goddess’. ‘G-d/ess’ attempts to convey the difficulty of naming the divine. The dash is an old Jewish practice meant to show the impossibility of confining the divine in a word. The single ‘d’ and feminine suffix are to show that I don’t experience the goddess as different from or inferior to what folks generally refer to as God.”

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