Friends Publishing is a non-profit organization dedicated to communicating Quaker experience in order to connect & deepen spiritual lives. Friends Journal is our flagship publication, with a legacy that goes back to 1827.
"Too many modern Friends seem to act as if our Quaker beliefs and practices are of relevance only to a select few that are drawn to them," Peter Blood-Patterson worries. "If we believe God can provide the words and prayers that we speak during worship in our meetinghouses, would God not also provide us words by the Holy Spirit to speak to non-Friends in settings quite different from the worship in our meetings?"
https://www.friendsjournal.org/coming-out-from-under-our-bushel/
"My journey into faith and with faith and through faith is primarily to do with seeking a direct connection and communication with the Divine," Tim Gee says—and for a long time, that led to Scripture taking a back seat.
"As I've experienced a number of things, though, I've found great companionship with different people in the Bible—wonderful empathy as I observe them seeking a direct relationship with the Divine, trying to understand what it is God wants them to do."
https://quakerspeak.com/video/the-quaker-approach-to-the-bible/
Eleanor Nesbitt’s Open to New Light is an erudite yet accessible account of Quakers and their encounters with members of other religions from the earliest years of the Quaker faith to the present day.
https://www.friendsjournal.org/book/open-to-new-light-quakers-and-other-faiths/
Like revivals of the past, twenty-first-century Friends revivals will find our movements judged by future generations. If we are faithful, future generations will find that much of our work is rooted in the Eternal, in the Kingdom, even while the specifics may be responses to particular conditions. Our work will live on in this way, in communion with future #Quakers.
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come."
Early Quakers believed in the Spirit who would convey Jesus’s truth to them, even after a millennium and a half, because it had already happened, and continued to happen, to many of them.
![[A black-and-white photograph of a young Black man bowing his head in prayer, bringing his clasped hands to his mouth. He stands in a dimly lit space, possibly a house of worship.]](https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/114/665/599/984/426/045/original/8c3769d6e29fe3d0.jpg)
At a time when Philadelphia's prominence as an industrial and educational force enabled international partnerships, #Quakers were able to establish a significant presence in Japan. A new essay collection reveals the endeavors and initiatives of Quaker women leaders who sat at the table, walked cheerfully over the world, and knew the spiritual aspect of how to touch peace.
"After surviving COVID and making it through several years of moves, transitions, deaths, and grief," Suzanne W. Cole Sullivan reports, "my meeting’s First-day school met on odd weeks for a story, an activity, and a lot of free play. It was the honest best we could muster at the time, and it worked until we had something else."
That "something else" came about because "Spirit zipped by with an idea, and I grabbed on for dear life."
Daniel Silliman's One Lost Soul delves into Richard Nixon's Quaker upbringing and his tortured relationship with the faith as an adult.
"In the silence and darkness of our inner being, we have no choice but to see our true selves and weigh our actions in the balance," Cameron McWhirter writes. "Silliman shows that Nixon ran from such an assessment, and his life as a consequence came crashing down around him."
https://www.friendsjournal.org/book/one-lost-soul-richard-nixons-search-for-salvation/
Christians (including Christ-centered Friends) don’t celebrate Pentecost just because a roomful of spiritual revolutionaries had a dramatic mystical experience. Pentecost matters because of what happened AFTER the apostles began speaking in tongues.
https://quaker.org/2025/06/02/all-filled-with-the-holy-spirit/
"I love the philosophy of Quakerism," says Neil Trueblood. "We all need to do whatever little we can to help society. We know there’s that of God in everyone... As a community, if we all do something, it just makes it all work. It’s easy to do nothing. It’s easy to argue against any kind of program. It does take work, attention, and humility to do something."
https://www.friendsjournal.org/helping-our-neighbors-with-housing/
Many Friends know Scattergood as a Friends school near West Branch, Iowa. However, in 1941, when H.M. Bouwman's novel takes place, the school was closed and housed refugees from the war in Europe.
Peggy Mott, an almost 13-year-old Iowa farm girl who lives near the school, is not a Quaker, but her friend and classmate Joe is, and he suggests she come with him to Scattergood, where he is a volunteer.
As Acts begins, Luke revisits the final scene of his own gospel—Jesus’s ascension into heaven—adding new details. The gospel makes it seem like Jesus appeared before his apostles after his crucifixion, gave them some final wisdom, then walked with them to the nearby town of Bethany where he bid them adieu, all in one day. Acts stretches their time with the resurrected Christ to forty days, nearly a month and a half of reinforcing all he had taught them.
https://quaker.org/2025/05/26/why-do-you-stand-looking-up-toward-heaven/
Aaron Becker's The Last Zookeeper could not be more timely. Its images of a world covered in monumental ruins and flooded by vast seas contain elegant and eloquently drawn atmospheric washes of watercolor that are both broad and strong, chilling and hopeful.
"The Quaker understanding of continuing revelation and freedom from dogma, especially in the light of a Zen perspective, calls for a refined understanding of faith," John Hickey says. "Faith has commonly been used to mean belief in something. If there is no doctrine to believe in, what does faith mean?"
The Beloved Community, the New Jerusalem described in Revelation, requires no temple because the covenantal relationship with God informs every inch of its territory. (Rev 21:22)
The people have no need of a “steeple-house,” as George Fox would call it, to show their love for God and their neighbors.
When the home of a lesbian couple is vandalized, the neighborhood children struggle to understand why someone would hate people who have shown nothing but love. Rainbow Allies tells the (true) story of how the children of Natick, Massachusetts, stood against hate by choosing inclusive and unconditional love.
https://www.friendsjournal.org/book/rainbow-allies-the-true-story-of-kids-who-stood-against-hate/
San Francisco Meeting member Gail Cornwall-Feeley volunteers with her children and other Friends at an overnight shelter in the gym of Buena Vista Horace Mann K–8 Community School in the city. She also occasionally volunteers at a food sharing event on Fridays.
When she was asked what motivates her to participate, Cornwall-Feeley said, “Inculcating Quaker values and living them and letting my life speak and encouraging my children to let their lives speak.”
https://www.friendsjournal.org/solidarity-with-our-unhoused-neighbors/
The Quaker Coalition for Uprooting Racism recently released a new set of “Anti-racist Clerking Advices for Friends” to help clerks in North American #Quaker communities center Friends of color who find themselves consistently marginalized in meetings for worship, business meetings, and other Quaker settings.
"Individual Quakers and Quaker meetings have long been involved in service to the unhoused," Chris Ferguson writes, "working against the racism we see deeply embedded in our housing system and in the operation of food kitchens, street ministries, and shelters."
But, he argues, our moral foundations call us to do more.
https://www.friendsjournal.org/shalom-and-right-relationship/
In this month's episode of the Quakers Today podcast, we ask: what does the word “home” mean to you? From a laundry ministry on the streets of San Francisco to a Quaker refuge during World War II, Friends are reimagining what it means to offer shelter, connection, and belonging.