This contribution to a symposium on quietism concerns what is known as the Quietist period of Quakerism in the eighteenth century. Dandelion addresses the key question of conflict between the quietist commitment of the Quaker faithful and the commitment of many among them to abolitionism and other pressing social causes. He reviews the scholarship on this issue, noting the recent tendency to look for mystical aspects to the social commitment of Quakers. Instead, however, he argues that the culture of Friends (...) during this period became self-enclosed to a remarkable degree, permitting some of the members to move about extramurally, as required by conscience, then return to their essentially quietist world. (shrink)

In this introduction to the fourth part of an ongoing symposium on quietism, Perl, the editor of the sponsoring journal Common Knowledge, remarks on a new question raised in this latest grouping of articles. Can there be such a thing as a “mezza voce quietism”? Can there be activist quietists or quietist activists or active teachers of quietism without self-contradiction? Perl takes Gandhi and “passive resistance” as his own test case, concluding that Gandhi was a teacher of quietism and that (...) satyagraha was a type of moral education directed at those (first the South Africans, then, more momentously, the British in India) whose spirits were imperiled by their self-confident certainty and whose manners were spoiled by their indelicacy and intrusiveness. (shrink)

In this multi-disciplinary collection, we ask the question, 'What did, and do, Quakers think about good and evil?' There are no simple or straightforwardly uniform answers to this, but in this collection, we draw together contributions that for the first time look at historical and contemporary Quakerdom's approach to the ethical and theological problem of evil and good. Within Quakerism can be found Liberal, Conservative, and Evangelical forms. This book uncovers the complex development of metaethical thought by a religious group (...) that has evolved with an unusual degree of diversity. In doing so, it also points beyond the boundaries of the Religious Society of Friends to engage with the spectrum of thinking in the wider religious world. (shrink)