PN – Friends Journal Seeks Submissions on the Theme: “Leadership”

When early Friends did away with the clergy they did away with hierarchy: or did they? Every generation of Friends have had debates over authority and leadership (sometimes fierce enough to lead to schisms) and the Friends Journal news column continues to publish modern-day stories which hinge on questions of power. With the rise of Quaker bureaucracies in the mid-twentieth-century, a new kind of professional leadership has taken hold without always examining the pluses and minuses of these new roles. Quakers also have always benefited from a kind of renegade authority from below–think of a figure like Benjamin Lay, speaking a truth to the power of the slave-owning Quaker leadership of the time, expelled from membership. How do we encourage this kind of leadership—and how might we be discouraging it today?

We prefer articles written in a fresh, non-academic style and with a constructive approach to spiritual seeking. We seek an open, curious and respectful tone even when discussing controversial subjects. We prefer articles rooted in the author’s own experiences of the divine. We publish poems that use image and metaphor to recreate an experience for the reader—which show rather than tell, “be” rather than mean.

Submissions should show an awareness of Friends’ ways and concerns, as well as sensitivity to them.. Friends value an experiential approach to life and religious thought.