Grand Rapids Friends Meeting

05/29/2026

Learn about the annual meeting of LEYM Quakers held in Ashland Ohio June 15-18, 2023. There's 9 workshops to choose from, plus worship opportunities, Bible Study, interesting plenary sessions and more.

05/29/2026

Conscientious objection is not passive. It is an active and deliberate engagement with one of the most serious questions a person can face: Would I participate in organized killing if my government told me to? If the answer is no, build the evidence for that answer now.

Stony Run Friends Meeting, a group of Quakers in Baltimore City, created a handy leaflet with practical tips. Visit their website to see it: "Registering With The Selective Service System As A Conscientious Objector To War." And share it with folks you know!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-QAmxpckxhRXLnIGI1yynhHXdh4HLMRIJB5sAWZ2Kc0/edit?tab=t.0

05/02/2026

The Supreme Court's dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is a tragic blow to the progress made by generations of courageous civil rights. But while the path ahead will be hard, we must not give up on the struggle for a just, inclusive democracy.

https://www.fcnl.org/updates/2026-05/week-world-tragic-setback-voting-rights

05/02/2026

Jeremiah Dixon was an English Quaker surveyor and astronomer. He was written out of Raby Meeting in Durham in 1760 at the age of 27 with this minute:

“Jery Dixon, son of George and Mary Dixon of Cockfield disowned for drinking to excess.”

But that reputation didn’t affect his career, as he and Charles Mason were selected by the Royal Society to observe the transit of Venus the following year. After this success, the pair were next contracted to resolve a boundary dispute between Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Dixon, Mason, and their Iroquois guides spent 1763-1767 surveying the boundary, but had to abandon the project before its completion when they came to Lenape territory and the guides refused to go farther. The border became known as the Mason-Dixon Line, and when Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1781, this line was the boundary between slave states in the south and free states in the north.

The most famous story about Jeremiah Dixon shows off his Quaker conscience, if not his Quaker methods. One day, Dixon came across a slave driver beating an enslaved woman.

Going up to him, Dixon said, “Thou must not do that!”

He received the curt answer, “You be damned! Mind your own business.”

Dixon replied, “If thou doesn’t desist, I'll thrash thee!” Then he seized the slave driver’s whip and with it gave him a sound thrashing. Dixon kept the whip as a trophy and took it back with him to Cockfield, where it was long regarded as a family treasure.

Dixon's name may be the origin for the nickname “Dixie" used for the Southern United States.

04/05/2026

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03/19/2026

Ahead of the installation of Sarah Mullally as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Tim Gee explores how women's ministry absolutely is Biblical.

03/18/2026

03/03/2026

02/21/2026

We become the stories that we tell ourselves.

The BBC just released a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, the classic novel by William Golding. It's beautifully made, but it's still telling the wrong story.

A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies. I wanted to know: has it ever actually happened? Have kids ever been shipwrecked on a deserted island?

It took me a year of research, but I found it. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and drifted for eight days without food or water. They washed up on 'Ata, a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, and what happened on that island was the exact opposite of William Golding's novel.

These boys set up a small commune. They built a food garden, stored rainwater in hollowed-out tree trunks, created a gym with improvised weights, and built a badminton court. One of them, Stephen (who would later become an engineer) managed to start a fire using two sticks. They kept it burning the entire time.

Of course they fought too. But when they argued, they had a rule: go to opposite ends of the island, cool down, then come back and apologize. As one of them told me: ‘That's how we stayed friends.’

Back home, everyone assumed that the boys – Luke, Stephen, Sione, David, Kolo and Mano — were dead. When they were finally discovered by an Australian captain named Peter Warner, he radioed their names to Tonga. After twenty minutes, a tearful response came back: ‘You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a miracle!’

Peter commissioned a new ship, hired all six boys as his crew, and named the boat the Ata, after the island where he found them. They remained friends for the rest of their lives – Peter and Mano even became soulmates. I tracked them down, and it became one of the central chapters of my book Humankind.

Here's what struck me most: William Golding (the author of Lord of the Flies) was a troubled man, an alcoholic who once said ‘I have always understood the N***s, because I am of that sort by nature.’ I think he was projecting his own darkness onto children. And we turned it into a lesson about human nature that we teach to millions of kids around the world.

I think the real lesson is the opposite. When real children found themselves alone on a real island, they didn't descend into savagery. They cooperated. They took care of each other. They survived.

I'm not saying that the Tongan castaways were representative of all kids everywhere. But I am saying that every kid who has to read or watch the fictional Lord of the Flies also deserves to know what actually happened when it played out in real life.

Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.

02/20/2026

Finding Stability and Hope Through Quaker Practices in Turbulent TimesDiscover practical ways to cultivate resilience and inner peace amid social and politic...