by Stacey Denny | Mar 23, 2026 | Plain Speech Messages
If you’re a Quaker, you know our way of conducting the business of the meeting can be maddening. I grew up Roman Catholic, so the business of our congregation was decided by a priest, who reported to a bishop, who answered to the Pope, an old, white man who lived in...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 22, 2026 | Plain Speech Messages
When I was nine years old, we moved to a house with fields and woods and a creek. Several of our neighbors were Quakers, but this didn’t stop me from fantasizing about war. This illusion was helped along by a neighbor boy named Kevin who told me the hole in the glass...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 14, 2026 | Plain Speech Messages
I met a man recently who believes God speaks to him. Not in the way we have customarily believed God communicates with us, through the historic tenets of the Church, or through the Bible, or the witness of Jesus. He believes God speaks to him in a voice he can hear...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 14, 2026 | Plain Speech Messages
Last week, I received an email from a college professor who teaches philosophy and is writing a book about what he calls petitionary prayer. I can’t count the times I’ve been contacted by college professors writing books. Well, actually I can. This was the first time....
by Stacey Denny | Mar 14, 2026 | Plain Speech Messages
I was talking with some friends this past week and asked them, if they didn’t mind, to tell the rest of us their earliest memory. After a while I noticed a pattern emerging. No one described a mundane memory. Instead, the memories were either fun or painful. One man...
