the earthwitness journal - Comments

Houses Colorado springs comments on The First Friends and Slavery

Houses Colorado springs — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 08:12:21 +0000

Implicit in your discussion about slavery in the ancient world is the fact that slaves were often better off than poor non-slaves. Owners had obligations towards slaves.There was no welfare in the ancient world, or in the slavery/indentured servant world of England. Slavery was also a means of ensuring that poor people would be fed.Which means those dismissing the first Friends out of hand just don't want to do the work of sifting out the wheat from the chaff.

Francis O'Hara comments on A Christianity with Drums and Feathers

Francis O'Hara — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:15:30 +0000

Here in the Northeast USA , New York Yearly Meeting this thursday is the annual honoring of the Canadaigua Treaty among the Haudaushaunee People (aka Six Nations or People Of the Longhouse). As a Euro-American as I'm able I attend. Part of the special annual event is the honoring of Quakers and the role they played in making this treaty long ago. This is a treaty which apparently remains unbroken.Note It may also be known as the "Pickering Treaty".
Thank you for allowing me to speak.

Ian Davis comments on Angela Manno Speaks Out Against Nuclear Power

Ian Davis — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:30:54 +0000

I'd have to say that the alternative to nuclear is coal and oil at present, and given what oil is currently doing to the gulf, nuclear seems the cleaner option. Anyone concerned about global warming is also going to be forced to conclude that nuclear has a much smaller carbon footprint. Nuclear energy is rated to have a risk of one serious accident every 14,000 years.. that we've had several in the last 50 says worse things about our own carelessness than it does about the technology itself. Testing a nuclear reactors behaviour when all the fail safes are disabled (as happened at Chernobyl) is akin to testing the crumple zone of a car by reversing at high speed into a truck.

Marshall Massey comments on Tender Mercies

Marshall Massey — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:46:04 +0000

Tyrone, my health is fine; my blogging's on hold while I finish writing a book. I do intend to return to blogging eventually.

I appreciate your concern.

tyrone ferrara comments on Tender Mercies

tyrone ferrara — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:08:32 +0000

Dear Friend

Looks like Marsha Freeman is getting her wish.

I noticed that you no long blog. I pray that all is well with you.

Marshall Massey comments on Images from Iowa (Conservative)

Marshall Massey — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:36:50 +0000

Actually, our yearly meeting gathers every summer at Hickory Grove Meeting, on the grounds of Scattergood School, just a few miles east of West Branch. That's yet another of the old nineteenth-century meetinghouses. Richard Nixon's grandmother is buried there.

Hoover, though, belonged to the Five Years Meeting branch of Friends, not to our Conservative branch. The Five Years Meeting branch had gotten caught up in the Holiness Revival movement during the late nineteenth century, and was, by Hoover's day, a world of hymn singing, altar calls, and come-to-Jesus sermons. Despite the old-fashioned look of Hoover's meetinghouse, it was a world closer to what people nowadays call evangelical Protestantism than to traditional Quakerism.

Marshall Massey comments on Across the Hocking Hills

Marshall Massey — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:26:12 +0000

Thank you for the bits of background, Ellen!

Ellen Martin comments on To the Spoon River

Ellen Martin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:43:02 +0000

Oh, Michael and Newman aren't in mine, either, certainly not Newman, but they furnish good allusions. Anyway, I couldn't risk teasing you at this point, even though I half expected clarification "down the road." I had a little fun, and I hope not too much fun, commenting from time to time As I Read, and not After. I am relieved that your feet and ankles and everything healed at all! We ask so much of them, and think of them so rarely. I think your working compromise with the car was very sound. You saw what you could and kept to fairly slow speeds and frequent stops throughout. And your eye for geology helped you see the land more readily than many of us would be able to.

Ellen Martin comments on Images from Iowa (Conservative)

Ellen Martin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:33:39 +0000

At Hoover's Birthplace in West Branch near Iowa City, one finds, not only the spacious beginnings of restored native prairie, but also the old Meeting House that Hoover's family went to, preserved near the homestead cabin he was born in. A beautiful piece of carpentry, like the one pictured above. If only Hoover had had the openness or imagination to discern that all the strategies that had worked so well for him before, whether making money or feeding Belgium, were not working after 1929. Not that I would want to exchange FDR for Hoover, but that one knows a great deal of needless suffering, and a sad period of depression for Hoover himself, ensued. (Which didn't stop him from retiring to the Waldorf Astoria.)

Ellen Martin comments on Across the Hocking Hills

Ellen Martin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:34:25 +0000

The iron furnaces of the Hocking Hills were abandonned when the Mesabi Range deposit in Minnesota was discovered. The soil had been acidified by the smelting process and charcoal making, and what patches of level land there were, had been rendered unfit for a decent vegetable garden. Both people and land got poor fast. Then the Depression arrived, and the New Deal people called the county and said, we're making a Forest in the Hocking Hills. The county people said there were no trees there. That's ok, said the New Deal, we'll build the park, and the trees will come. And by god that's what happened. FDR sent out CCC guys who cleared paths (which damage lines of landscape but preserve everything around it), built picnic tables and piers into the tiny reservoir lakes, and planted trees. At first they planted ridiculously unlikely exotics, but in March '07 I was assured by a lady in charge of much of the Wayne Forest that they've been planting only native and attested trees since the 80s. The 80s!! No great greed without some local intervention. This was all expounded at a meeting of the West Virginia Native Plant Society.