Social revolution, Quaker style
Ever wonder what a social revolution led by Quakers would look like today? Peace loving, non-violent, decision making by consensus Quakers, the Religious Society of Friends? We’ll have a chance at an answer with an 8-session study of the book, Oppose and Propose, Lessons from Movement for a New Society by Andrew Cornell.
Movement for a New Society, or MNS, began in 1971 in Philadelphia by a group of young Quakers and became a national network of activists committed to building a nonviolent revolution. Before ending as an organization in 1988 it had a network of “collectives” in the Boston/Northeast Region, the Mid-Atlantic Region, Tucson, Seattle, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin, among other areas. This radical pacifist organization pioneered forms of consensus decision making, communal living, direct action, and self-education now central to today’s antiauthoritarian movements.
We’ll start the study in June to give us time to order, receive and read the book before beginning the study.
We’re calling this a Gadfly Circle— gatherings to confront today’s social ills. We’ll begin Monday, June 6, hosted on a Discord Server from 5 pm to 6:10 pm, Central Daylight.
This Summer Monday Reading Circle schedule:
Note. No session on July 4.
The book is available at this web site:
https://www.akpress.org/opposeandpropose.html .
It is 200 pages and costs $12.
More on the Movement for a New Society (MNS) may be found below on this site
https://movementforanewsociety.org
If you are curious and/or want to participate send me an email and I’ll send you an invitation.
I’ll soon post a description of a reading circle.