Opportunities to work with me in 2025

I’ve got a number of exciting online engagements lined up for 2025. Do come and join me!

Book Group: A Testament of Devotion by Thomas Kelly (Monday 23 June – Monday 28 July 2025)

Published in 1941, A Testament of Devotion is a classic of Quaker spirituality. In this course we will dive deeply into Thomas Kelly’s words on the light within, holy obedience, the Blessed Community, the Eternal Now, and the simplification of life.

Quakers and the Spirit: The Annual CRQS/QSRA Quaker Studies Conference (Saturday 28 June 2025)

At this day conference I’m presenting a paper called “Quaking in the Spirit of God, exorcising the spirit of whiteness.” Quakers were named in the 17^th century for their experience of ecstatic trembling, the physical evidence of a new spiritual birth. Quakers in Britain today do not quake, or if they do, only in an individual, interior sense. Contemporary Quaker worship is characterised by silence and stillness. Large numbers of Quakers now worship online, where they can mute and hide their bodies by turning off their mics and cameras. Perhaps Quaker worship would be easier without a body altogether. I suggest this tendency towards disembodiment is related to the community’s whiteness. Kelly Brown Douglas critiques a “Platonized Christianity” that privileges the non-sensible soul over the sensual body, noting a “natural coherence” between this and white culture. Barbara Ann Holmes and Ashon Crawley have challenged the white correlation of spirituality with silence, pointing to the contemplative nature of exuberant Black spiritual practices and “Black noise.” Without denying the role of silence in Black spiritualities, such as in the mysticism of Howard Thurman, it is possible that the silences of Quakerism owe something to the silences of whiteness. James Cone wrote that whites can only be saved from whiteness by an encounter with God’s wrath. For the first Quakers quaking was an experience of judgement, the earthquake that precedes the silence of heaven (Rev. 6, 8). I suggest that Quakers might resist a white disembodied spirituality by being open to quaking as an experience of God’s judgment within corporate worship.

Finding the Blessed Community (Monday 18 August 2025)

The 20th century Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly had a vision of the “Blessed Community.” In this pay-as-led workshop we’ll reflect critically on Kelly’s vision and his understanding of “the Fellowship,” reading and discussing extracts from his classic book A Testament of Devotion.

Whose Friends Are We? (Monday 13 October – Monday 17 November 2025)

Quakers have always called each other “Friends,” but what does this mean? In this course I offer a Quaker theology of Friendship, reflecting on what it might mean to be friends of God, Christ and each other in the 21st century. This course approaches a theology of Friendship from a number of angles. These include the Biblical roots of the term friend, and how Christians have understood friendship over the centuries. As this course emerges from my work on Quaker theology and whiteness, I’m particularly interested in what it means for non-Jewish, white Quakers to be friends of a Jewish, Black Jesus.