[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Richard P Hayes]

Dan Lusthaus wrote:

>True, to some extent. The Quakers did tolerate some others (and became 
the
>new homeland for the Pennsylvania Dutch [actually Deutsch, i.e., 
German] and
>apple butter), but they were also intolerant of still others. They
>eventually even became intolerant of their own, leading to a division
>between the Eastern Quakers, and the more Protestantized variety (who 
live
>in different places from each other today, the latter in the Midwest, 
rather
>than PA).

You have now jumped ahead some two hundred years, to the mid-nineteenth 
century, the time of the so-called Holiness movement. It was then that 
evangelical Quakers abandoned the older Qualer principles of the silent 
meeting of worship and the pacifist testimony and developed an ordained 
clergy and such oddball innovations as hymns and altars. This 
evangelical wing was not warmly received by traditional Quakers, but 
they were certainly not persecuted or shunned. When one considers that 
Richard Nixon was from this evangelical branch of the Quakers, it is 
not surprising that the paficist Quakers felt the evangelicals were not 
speaking to their condition. But it would be going too far to say that 
there was intolerance on the part of either branch toward the other. 
The relations between the two branches of Quakers were never as frosty 
as the relations between followers of Shinran and followers of 
Nichiren, or as the relations between traditional dGe-lugs-pas and the 
followers of NKT. If you want to see some real hostility, you'll do 
better to look at Buddhists than at Quakers.




------------------------
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico

Office: 525 Humanities
Phone:  277-8232