Bøger af Douglas Gwyn

Personality and Place: The Life and Times of Pendle Hill Douglas Gwyn (Plain Press, 2014) Pendle Hill is a Quaker center for study and contemplation near Philadelphia. Founded in 1930, it has been a resource for Quakers (Friends) and a variety of other religious seekers, to refresh their spirits and discern new directions of service in the world. The center has also maintained a prophetic witness to the world through lectures, workshops, conferences and publications that critique modern trends of militarism, racism, and a variety of social and economic injustices and offer life-affirming alternatives. At the same time, the Pendle Hill community models more peaceful, equal and sustainable patterns of living. This book follows Pendle Hill's development through its first 80 years, 1930 to 2010, showing how the center has been shaped by wider social and religious trends, while simultaneously offering prophetic alternatives to some of them. The book charts that history using the coordinates of personality and place. Pendle Hill's founding and first 40 years were strongly influenced by the religious philosophy of personalism, which maintains that persons are formed in dialogue and community, and that healthy communities equip individual persons to be agents for peaceful social transformation in the wider world. The book shows how personalism has correlated with Quaker faith and practice, sometimes becoming more religiously and socially radical, other times more quietist and mystical. While personalism is a forgotten philosophical movement today, its subliminal influence is still detectable in Pendle Hill's second 40 years, mainly by way of renewed emphasis on Quaker faith and practice. Meanwhile, the book explores Pendle Hill's placement in affluent, suburban Philadelphia - yet less than five miles from Chester, Pennsylvania, one of the poorest towns its size in the United States. The ebb and flow of Pendle Hill's engagement with Chester exemplifies the interaction of class and race, geography and ideology on the space-time grid of a capitalist society. Personality and Place utilizes the story of Pendle Hill as a lens to focus on larger Quaker and American currents over the past 80 years. Laurens van der Post commented on his visits to Pendle Hill in the 1950s: I recognized immediately in Pendle Hill a kind of Oasis in the waste land of the spirit ... I went there again and again not only to join in the dialogue between the confused modern soul and the ultimate meaning of life, but to be encouraged by the conviction that in Pendle Hill one already had, as it were, a small pilot scheme of the essential community to come.

A minister and writer in Quaker history and theology looks back at the Christian faith that has sustained his ministry among Friends for over forty years. Gwyn writes of "gospel-space" as that realm where he finds his story in the gospel story and the gospel story in his own. This is not a linear memoir but a series of reflections on different aspects of his journey in faith. Each chapter includes the lyric from one of his songs from over the years, highlighting the ironic and often humorous experience of God's grace. The arc of the chapters covers not only personal experience but a reading of the past half-century of American history, detecting resonances with the social history around the ancient gospel narratives. An "Itinerary" at the end summarizes the various geographical and theological terrains of "gospel-space" this seeker-found has traversed. A related essay is included in this volume: "Tomb with a View: The History of the World as Told to Me by Mary Magdalene." It is a "chiastic" overview of history, with its turning-point at the empty tomb of Jesus. God's covenantal purposes interact with social history in surprising ways. A "Background" piece at the end explains how this project began in 1988 and eventually found its present form. Life in Gospel-Space also introduces the concept of the common(s), which Gwyn explores further in subsequent books, Into the Common (2022) and Further into the Common (2023).

This book tells stories of early Quakers in the 1650s answering the call to radical faithfulness and the covenantal life that brought them together into faithful community. The stories show how the Bible framed their understanding of calling and faithfulness, and how answering the call gave them fresh understandings of Scripture. Part II shows how Quaker faith and practice through the centuries has expressed and enacted a covenantal life in the changing circumstances of the modern world. This book is offered as inspiration and creative stimulus for modern Friends and others answering the call to radical faithfulness in the circumstances of our own times.

Explores the here-and-now experience of eternal reality in Christ through a close reading of thirteen conversations in the Gospel of John, in which the history and mystery of Jesus are revealed. Each of these readings is followed by examples of ways Quakers have grappled with its message and by a guided meditation inviting readers to experience the form Christ takes in our lives.

Gwyn emphasizes the apocalyptic perspective behind George Fox's declaration that Christ has come to teach his people himself and describes how it affected Fox's view of preaching, worship, and Church order. This work helps explain the urgency of the message that sparked early Friends.

This sweeping book tells about the development of Friends General Conference up to 1950, primarily through the lens of the Conferences.One central motif is that these biennial gatherings renewed the courage and resolve of Friends to face the daunting disappointments of the first half of the 20th century. Modernity promised great advances in human society and no group was more confident of progress than FGC Friends at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.Through the conferences, the melancholy of two world wars, the capitalist debacle of the Great Depression, and the stubborn blights of American racism were turned into the spleen of renewed hope and activism, as Friends gathered together to learn, network, and find new reasons for hope.Gwyn characterizes the first fifty years of the conferences as FGC's "heroic era." A Gathering of Spirits will help FGC Friends discover the deeper roots of a tradition they continue to this day and to will draw renewed courage