Quaker Life, Equality Winter 2025
Purchase a single copy of the Winter 2025 issue of Quaker Life: A mosaic of Friendly living on the theme of Equality.
With this issue on equality, Quaker Life has now reflected upon each of the Quaker testimonies in the shorthand list of testimonies that Friends frequently reference, e.g.: peace (Spring 2020), community (Summer 2021), simplicity (Fall 2021), integrity (Spring 2022), stewardship (Fall 2022), and equality. Until this issue, we did not choose these as themes because they were testimonies, we chose them because they are aspects of Christian/Quaker life. It was only when I realized that we had, in fact, considered nearly all of the testimonies in the SPICES list that we chose equality as a theme, to complete the set.
It surprised me how difficult it was to find contributors on this theme. It has taken nearly
eighteen months to gather these articles; some of those we invited to contribute declined, while others who accepted wrote slowly. I don't believe that people were unmoved by the topic; I suspect, rather, that our collective hesitation to write about equality is an embarrassed recognition that Quakers have not been as "exceptional" (to use the word Max Carter uses) in our enactment of equality as other groups believe we have been - and, based on our early theology, as we expect ourselves to have been. Be that as it may, equality or the lack thereof is herein considered in a wide array of appearances: from homelessness and impoverishment to the pulpit, American Indians to emergency rooms, segregation to immigrant communities to the Cuban state.
