I attended Quakers' Adult Education session this morning, Bridge City Friends Meeting. We had a large group, including some out-of-towners attending a steering committee meeting at the Annual level (Quakers rank their meetings in terms of their business meeting's frequency, from yearly (like NPYM) to quarterly (like WQM) to monthy (BCFM being a monthly meeting)).
Our topic was Witness, sections thereon heading into our new Faith and Practice (rewrite in progress). I was pleased to show up with this crumpled and creased "Quaker guts" poster, thanks to Dan Stutesman. We explored our Beanite beginnings, as diagrammed, with Miriam Laing showing me a more swoopy (less swampy?) version from another text (she's quite the scholar). I sat between Larry Ferguson (happy birthday!) and Rocky Garrison during the meeting.
I mentioned at one point being a student of marketing and realizing from my hours of research for that Youtube survey, that the meme complex centered around that Quaker Oats guy, a kind of figurehead known as "William Penn" in some blogs, is widely associated with our practice and so it'd behoove Friends to pay some attention to the various marketing campaigns launched by that company.
I congratulated them on the non-misanthropic tone of their latest Go Humans Go slogan, as tacked on at the end of the above commercial. Ron Braithwaite cited Jerry Garcia for inspiring his practices around kindness.
Yes, you could say Quaker oats was our idea: Floyd Schmoe's grandmother gets the credit -- see Lives That Speak, ISBN 2-888305-32-0, pg. 116.
Our discussion was expertly clerked (not be me -- I retired as clerk of Adult Education last cycle, have only the AFSC liaison role these days, plenty time-consuming).
We filled the white board with notes, which I'm chronicling here with two shots by my Olympus Stylus 720SW, uploading to my Photostream for Jane Ewert's expert note taking (another serious scholar on our most talented and gifted crew).
Those two shots then: [1][2].
