Quaker Nantucket: The Religious Community Behind the Whaling Empire

by Robert Leach. From Amazon:

The authors provide detailed information about the rise and fall of Nantucket's Quaker community and its whaling industry. If your Nantucket ancestors include family names like Macy, Starbuck, Coffin, Bunker, etc., you'll gain additional perspective on the interconnections between family, religion, and whaling, the "splintering" of the Quaker community, and some reasons for migration off island.

I live on Macy Street - named after Thomas Macy, who lived in Amesbury and went to Nantucket. Also a great history of the real Starbuck family, of Moby Dick fame. This is a great addition to my Quaker history library!

New England Quaker Meetinghouses, Past and Present

Entries on 138 Meetinghouses, historical facts/locations/pictures. Weeks set out to photograph every meetinghouse in New England. A great resource. I would love to visit some of these places myself this summer, and this will be a good start!

The Median Isn't The Message - Gould

In a week when I have seemed overwhelmed, yet again, with medical predictions and statistics and "when will I get sicker?" kind of questioning....

it helps to read this article. Stephen Jay Gould did later die of cancer, but unrelated to the first diagnosis that first led him to write this essay. Excerpted below, but the whole thing deserves a read.

We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find an unambiguous "beginning of life" or "definition of death," although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated immutable entities, leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard "realities," and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a reasonable interpretation.

But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently - and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole, but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation.

Of course, my medical distress is chronic, not (hopefully) terminal - so I don't have the sense of urgency at the moment that Gould did. But as I look at all the medical predictions I have been handed, I too doubt the statistics.

Faith and Practice - online

Faith and Practice - NEYM

Happy about this. I do lots of reading, and I must say being able to comment on it here or elsewhere by excerpting and pasting is fabulous. I used to read the Britain Yearly Meeting version online.

Kiwi!

I love this simple video. Not that I'm advocating jumping off any cliffs for anyone... but Kiwi knows that even for a moment, he needs to fly.

NYT. Friedman. Yay for hope.

Do not underestimate what seeds can get planted when American leaders don’t just propagate their values, but visibly live them. Mr. Obama will be speaking at Cairo University. When young Arabs and Muslims see an American president who looks like them, has a name like theirs, has Muslims in his family and comes into their world and speaks the truth, it will be empowering and disturbing at the same time. People will be asking: “Why is this guy who looks like everyone on the street here the head of the free world and we can’t even touch freedom?” You never know where that goes.

From Friedman's column. Yes, we do all need to step up, world!

“ Those who love their country in the light of their love of God, express that love of country by endeavoring to make it respected rather than feared, loved rather than hated. But those who love only their country express that love by trying to make it feared and succeed all too often in making it hated.” Pendle Hill Pamphlet #374, pg. 27


Doing a lot of reading about war this week. Looking with concern at yet more of it. No comments on solutions or even an ability to sort out how I feel right now. The media talking points are grating on me more than usual this week I guess. When I stumbled across this quotation, I wanted to leave it here on the blog.