The February Quaker Forum, facilitated by Doylestown Meeting’s Peace and Service Committee, is titled “Money and Soul.” It will be framed around the thoughts expressed by Friend Pamela Haines in a Pendle Hill pamphlet of the same name. She is a member of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting and an active member of the Eco-Justice Collaborative.
Pamela has graciously agreed to join us for the discussion! She’ll be opening with some brief comments and will be participating in discussing queries she created relevant to the subject.
The Forum will begin at 11:20 AM after the rise of Meeting for Worship on February 27th. It will be held on Zoom only, and access will be through the link provided via the DMMF listserv email sent out for that day’s Meeting for Worship. Contact John Baker at givingnature@me.com for the link.
The forum will begin with the Quaker Speak video A Quaker Perspective on Economics. And while not necessary to read for participation in the forum, we highly recommend ordering a copy of the Money and Soul pamphlet from Pendle Hill and read it as a seeding. You can order it by clicking on this link: https://pendlehill.org/product/money-soul/. In lieu of the pamphlet, you can access an unabridged transcript of a 2017 Intermountain Yearly Meeting plenary talk upon which the pamphlet is based here : https://westernfriend.org/media/money-and-soul-unabridged.
The pamphlet and talk discuss the ageless struggles between what we truly need for ourselves, what we need to do for each other and what we need to do all together to maintain a human healthy planet. Some of the queries Friend Haines raises are:
• To what do you conscientiously object, and why?
• What values do you claim in the area of money and economics?
• How do you define true wealth?
• What messages have we taken in that cloud our ability to live with integrity?
• What can Friends do to create a healthy, sustainable “generative” economy”?
Other readings we suggest for seeding are:
• Kenneth E. Boulding’s short but seminal essay The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth. You can get a free pdf of the essay here:
http://arachnid.biosci.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Boulding_SpaceshipEarth.pdf
• Deborah Cadbury’s The Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers. Written by a descendent of the Cadbury Quakers, the book provides a vivid portrait of a Quaker family who began one of the most successful chocolate companies in the world and whose Quaker values and traditions were challenged by their business’s existential struggle with its most fearsome competitors, among them no greater than Hershey chocolate.
Hope you can join us!