Imagination & Spirit: A Contemporary Quaker Reader - Softcover

J. Brent Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0944350615 ISBN 13: 9780944350614

Publisher: Friends United Press, 2003

Synopsis

Chicken Soup for the Soul - Quaker style! Imagination and Spirit offers the "best of the best" by contemporary Quaker authors with a brief biography of each. Features work of Daisy Newman, Jessamyn West, Richard J. Foster, Douglas V. Steere, Thomas Mullen, D. Elton Trueblood, Elizabeth Gray Vining, Scott Russell Sanders, Irene Allen, Phil Gulley, James A. Michener, Thomas Kelly, Jan De Hartog, Elfrida Vipont Foulds, and David Yount.

About this title

About the Author:

J. Brent Bill is the associate director of the Indianapolis Center for Congregations. He is the assistant book review editor for Friends Journal and director of the Ministry of Writing Annual Colloquium at Earlham School of Religion. He lives in Plainfield, Indiana.

From Publishers Weekly:

It's high time the traditional Publishers of Truth as Quakers originally called themselves published something for today's general readers outside the Quaker fold. Bill's anthology picks up where the Quaker Reader (edited by novelist Jessamyn West) left, focusing on writings from the latter half of the 20th century. The prose mix is lively: nonfiction devotional slices from modern mystic Thomas Kelly are served up along with such fiction as an excerpt from the murder mystery Quaker Testimony by Irene Allen, pen name for geologist Elsa Kirsten Peters. Such dizzying range makes the point that contemporary Quakers liberal, pastoral, evangelical can be mildly or wildly different despite common core beliefs in peace, simplicity, truth telling and ongoing divine revelation. At the same time it offers excerpts from such better known Quaker believers as James Michener and Richard Foster, the anthology introduces such unsung writers as children's book specialist Elfrida Vipont Foulds, one of a notably large cadre of women who have always been empowered in Quaker tradition to speak or write. Anthologies are necessarily arbitrary, acknowledges editor Bill, an Earlham College writing program graduate who provides helpful biographical introductions. Still, the influential writer-educator Parker Palmer should have been included. However, this collection is a welcome reminder that the small Society of Friends, as Quakers are also known, continues to offer creative and relevant witness to the truth as found within and practiced in community.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Friends United Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0944350615
• ISBN 13: 9780944350614
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: J. Brent Bill