Quakers on the WWW

May 31, 2004 8:38 AM

Digital Quaker Collection Courtesy of Earlham College, the Digital Quaker Collection offers free access to "over 500 individual Quaker works from the 17th and 18th centuries." More historical texts, including many from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are available from The Quaker Writings Home Page. (Main link via Scribblingwoman.)
posted by thomas j wise (5 comments total)

Wow. Quite a collection. Those fighting for peace and justice today should take a look.

I went to Earlham, but hardly learned anything about Quakers/Friends while there. Since then, at least once a year while teaching American Lit, I make sure that kids have a passing familiarity with the religion's history. (Most of them think: Quaker, Amish, same thing.)

When I taught at a school with much less bright and hip kids than I currently work with, my mission was to make sure they knew that Japan and China were two different countries.
posted by kozad at 10:15 AM on May 31, 2004

It's amazing to see how far technology has come at Earlham since my days there (Class of 1986). When I worked at the computing center my freshman year, we were still using a PDP-11/70, with cool flashing lights and switches on the front!
posted by neurodoc at 1:24 PM on May 31, 2004

I found the site rather difficult to navigate, but it was a pleasure to be reminded of my favourite passage of Quaker writing:

There is a spirit which I feel, that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end: Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations: as it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thoughts to any other: If it be betrayed, it bears it; for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned, and takes its kingdom with entreaty, and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind .. (James Nayler, 1660)

British Friends have a book called Quaker Faith and Practice, which includes many extracts from these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts. These are not just historical documents; they are still a source of inspiration and practical guidance for Friends today, and rightly so. (IANAQ, but have great respect for the Quaker tradition.)
posted by verstegan at 4:12 PM on May 31, 2004

Static links will be nice. But the keyword searching makes it worthwhile. I found Quaker remarks on most of their fellow dissenters . (For example, William Penn's "takedown" of my favorites-- the Muggletonians--The New Witnesses prov'd Old Hereticks: Or, Information to the Ignorant; in which the Doctrines of John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, are proved to be mostly Ancient Whimsies, Blasphemies and Heresies, from the Evidence of Scripture, Reason, and several Historians.) Great for students of Seventeenth century radicalism.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:48 AM on June 1, 2004

Fight, Fight, Inner Light! Kill, Quakers, kill!
Smash 'em! Knock 'em! Beat 'em senseless!
Do we have consensus?
posted by dfowler at 8:57 AM on June 1, 2004