Through the Flaming Sword

A note on this page: This brief history of how this blog originated was originally published in Central Philadelphia Meeting’s newsletter in February 2020 at the request of Greg Barnes, its editor. After writing it, I realized that I should have written something like this a long time ago for the blog itself. So here it is.

In 1984, I attended the First North American Bioregional Congress, a week-long gathering of bioregionalist thinkers and activists. (Bioregionalism is a movement to restructure all social systems as if the land base the people occupy actually mattered. A bioregion is a region distinguished by its characteristic geography and ecosystems.) While there, I participated in a sweat lodge ceremony that changed my life.

I had for years been an avid student of First Nation history, culture, and spirit-ways and I’d been in two sweat lodge ceremonies, which are purification ceremonies that amount to a spiritual steam baths.

In that sweat lodge I had a mystical experience that opened up Spirit to me as a Muse. My writing life and my spiritual life became fused.

When I became a Friend later in the 1980s, these two lives grew even closer. I found I was called to a written ministry among Friends.

Then in 1990, an opening bloomed into a leading to write a book of biblical earth stewardship theology. In 1995, Earlham School of Religion gave me its Patrick Henry Scholarship for Christian Writers and I went to ESR for a term to put my research on the page and I took their course in Writing as Ministry.

Then, in 2009 I think, I learned that, in 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney had sent out a Christmas Card with this quote from Benjamin Franklin in it: “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” Dick Cheney had claimed that God was on his side in his pursuit of American empire, which presumably included but was not limited to the war in Iraq.

I was already freaked out, not just about the war, but more broadly, about the Christian right’s virtual takeover of the Bush administration and its perversion of Jesus’ gospel and general weaponization of the Bible. As a counterforce, I started a blog titled Biblemonster: Contemporary issues under the light of a radical Bible. (biblemonster.wordpress.com) As I wrote in my opening post: “I originally conceived of BibleMonster as a corrective to the Bible-based politics and economics of the conservative Christian right during the Bush administration. I found my way, eventually, to a more constructive approach; now I hope to contribute biblical support for a growing progressive religious voice on the issues of our day as well as continue to question conservative biblical interpretation that supports regressive social policy.”

But Barack Obama was president by then and soon the threat of the Christian right seemed much more distant. Meanwhile, I felt led to write about Quakerism. So in 2011, I laid Biblemonster aside and started Through the Flaming Sword: Exploring Quaker Spirituality, Faith & Practice. (throughtheflamingsword.wordpress.com) I’ve been at it since. And the blog is still the main vehicle for my written Quaker ministry. I try to ask questions that I think are important to the Quaker movement, I explore out loud some of my own thinking as a theologian, and I share resources I think might be helpful to Friends and their meetings.