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.

A well-known Quaker historian explores the qualities of Quaker faith and practice that contribute to living sustainably in the world today. He explores such paradoxes as equality and community, unity and differentiation, integrity and personal discernment, and other aspects of life that Quakers have worked to bring into balance through their 350-year history. How have Quakers learned to create the kind of individual and community life that can prepare us to live fully and responsibly into a time of social and planetary change?

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 book advocates a renewal of the traditional Quaker peace testimony, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The liberal Quaker renewal of a century ago fostered a pacifist ideology that diverged from the existential faith-commitment to peace manifested by earlier Friends. But the optimism that world powers could be persuaded to adopt peace faltered as military-industrial interests grew more entrenched during the 20th century. Today's darkening human prospect forces Friends to reclaim their identity as a people of God that resists the dominant culture and wages an anti-war, a militant inversion of empire's militarist imperatives. Two inverse perspectives are required to reframe the issues. Peace Finds the Purpose of a Peculiar People begins with a close reading of 1 Peter 2:4-17. It then describes how the peace testimony developed among early Friends in the 17th century. The essay concludes by applying the framework of peculiar peoplehood, derived from 1 Peter and early Friends, to the current state of the Religious Society of Friends. The other essay of this book, Militant Peacemaking in the Manner of Friends, examines the issues inversely. It begins with the Book of Revelation, seen as an apocalyptic unmasking of the Roman Empire's demonic structure and a call for Christian resistance. Then it examines the early Quaker Lamb's War as a nonviolent social revolution inspired in part by a socially engaged reading of Revelation. The essay concludes with fresh perspective on the Quaker social testimonies as an anti-war that inverts and subverts today's imperial militarism.

This book advocates a renewal of the traditional Quaker peace testimony, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The liberal Quaker renewal of a century ago fostered a pacifist ideology that diverged from the existential faith-commitment to peace manifested by earlier Friends. But the optimism that world powers could be persuaded to adopt peace faltered as military-industrial interests grew more entrenched during the 20th century. Today's darkening human prospect forces Friends to reclaim their identity as a people of God that resists the dominant culture and wages an anti-war, a militant inversion of empire's militarist imperatives. Two inverse perspectives are required to reframe the issues. Peace Finds the Purpose of a Peculiar People begins with a close reading of 1 Peter 2:4-17. It then describes how the peace testimony developed among early Friends in the 17th century. The essay concludes by applying the framework of peculiar peoplehood, derived from 1 Peter and early Friends, to the current state of the Religious Society of Friends. The other essay of this book, Militant Peacemaking in the Manner of Friends, examines the issues inversely. It begins with the Book of Revelation, seen as an apocalyptic unmasking of the Roman Empire's demonic structure and a call for Christian resistance. Then it examines the early Quaker Lamb's War as a nonviolent social revolution inspired in part by a socially engaged reading of Revelation. The essay concludes with fresh perspective on the Quaker social testimonies as an anti-war that inverts and subverts today's imperial militarism.

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.

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

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).

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.

Doug Gwyn has researched and written extensively on early Quakers in 17th-century England. His other books include Apocalypse of the Word, and Seekers Found. He has taught at the Pendle Hill Quaker Study Center near Philadelphia, and at Woodbrooke in Birmingham, England. Doug has also worked with the American Friends Service Committee, and is Pastor of First Friends Church, Richmond, Indiana. The Covenant Crucified combines the scholarly and prophetic to compare covenant, uniting people under the care of a transcendent God, and contract, uniting them primarily through secular visions of self-interest. This book, part of Doug Gwyn's trilogy on early Quaker history, is critical to our understanding of early Friends and how the movement changed in the first decades. Gwyn outlines the highly distinctive nature of the Quaker covenant of light, and how that was transformed within a generation into a more worldly contractual understanding. It is also a call to Quakers today to recover a sense of covenant for the journey ahead. - Ben Pink Dandelion, Quaker Studies tutor, University of Birmingham/Woodbrooke