Bearing Witness: Quaker Process and a Culture of Peace

by Gray Cox

Overview

Quakers are cultural mutants with odd ways of talking and uncommon ways of behaving. Like Kenneth Boulding, I think this mutation in the phylum of Christianity has an important evolutionary potential. Quakers have a mutant ethic based on a mutant conception of rationality; these provide the seeds for a new culture – a culture of peace.

To speak of this ethic and this conception of rationality as "seed" serves to indicate both their dynamic character as processes and their organic character as parts of a growing whole. It should also serve to recall the power of a metaphor that early Quakers used frequently, a metaphor that spoke to their experience of the ways in which inward leadings led to outward action: the "seed of Christ."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940149179855
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	05/13/2014
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #262
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	87 KB

About the Author

Raised on the coast of Maine, Gray Cox is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University. He teaches at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and is a member of the Nashville Friends Meeting. He has written articles on social philosophy and a book, The Will at the Crossroads: A Reconstruction of Kant’s Moral Philosophy. He was a member of a Witness for Peace delegation that visited Nicaragua in July of 1984.

The first section of this pamphlet is based on a talk given at the 1983 meeting of the Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting Association of the Religious Society of Friends. The second part has grown out of current work on a book on peace and the transformation of our culture.