Through the Flaming Sword

I’ve been neglecting this blog for quite some time, but I recently was involved in committee work for my yearly meeting which required me to do some historical investigation of Quaker uses of the term exercise, as in “minutes of exercise” or “report of the exercises of the meeting,” and it seems appropriate to present what I found here.

As background, Illinois Yearly Meeting has, for many, many years, appointed a committee each year to compose a report called “the Exercises,” which summarizes the major activities and business conducted during the annual sessions of the yearly meeting. This report was traditionally sent to Friends Journal for publication, but it was noticed in the last few years that the Exercises were not being published. When representatives from the meeting inquired about this, they were informed that the editorial staff of Friends Journal did not consider the Exercises to be of…