When I Stopped Praying for People and Started Holding Them in the Light
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....
This Is No Time for Silence
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...
The Power We Have
by Stacey Denny | Feb 3, 2026 | Plain Speech Messages
When I was growing up, a man in our town ran for town board. He had the same last name as a well-respected citizen and just enough people were confused by the similarity in names that he was elected. He made the mistake in assuming that since he’d been elected to...
Quaker Talk on Hope
by Stacey Denny | Feb 3, 2026 | Plain Speech Messages
I have a nifty little app on my smart phone that allows me to look up genealogies, not just of famous people, but of just about everyone, including Mr. Hoban, an elderly man who lived down the street from me when I was a kid. He was a veteran of two wars—World War I...
When the Storm Comes
by Stacey Denny | Feb 3, 2026 | Plain Speech Messages
I’ve been sick this past week. At first, I thought it was a common cold, which isn’t a big deal. Three days arriving, three days here, three days departing. But then it went to my lungs, so I thought maybe it was bronchitis, which I tend to get this time of year. But...