Quaker-Buddhist Blendings

From their beginning, Friends have benefited from the religious ideas and spiritual practices of other communities.1 Such influences and confluences have always been a sign of spiritual openness and vitality among religious communities across history. Where, for example, would Augustine of Hippo, the most influential theologian in the history of Western Christianity, be without the insights of the pagan Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus? This essay considers two persons who identify as both Buddhist and Quaker yet define that relationship in complementary ways. Like other Christians, such as Ruben Habito and Paul Knitter,2 some Friends have explored the gifts of other-than-Christian communities. For some, this has led to a respectful borrowing of practices. For others, it has resulted in dual membership in Quakerism and another religion. Each of these poses challenges. Borrowers must consider the ethics of their actions, perhaps especially borrowers whose cultural histories include oppression and colonization of others. Dual belongers have to face the competing demands of two religious systems with their different concepts of self, reality, divinity, worship, meditation, and ethics

Review of T. Vail Palmer, Face to Face: Early Quaker Encounters with the Bible. (Newberg, OR: Barclay Press, 2016)

Excerpt: At the present moment, when—as with early Friends when the monarchy was restored and a vengefully conservative Parliament set out to undo all the good work of Friends and other religious radicals during the Commonwealth—political forces are at play to reverse all the efforts of the past half century to further social justice, a book like Face to Face can revive hope in the mighty acts of God. This is good news

Extremely high energy cosmic rays from relic particle decays

The expected proton and neutrino fluxes from decays of massive metastable relic particles is calculated using the HERWIG QCD event generator. The predicted proton spectrum can account for the observed flux of extremely high energy cosmic rays beyond the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff, for a decaying particle mass of O(10^{12}) GeV. The lifetime required is of O(10^{20}) yr if such particles constitute all of the dark matter (with a proportionally shorter lifetime for a smaller contribution). Such values are plausible if the metastable particles are hadron-like bound states from the hidden sector of supersymmetry breaking which decay through non-renormalizable interactions. The expected ratio of the proton to neutrino flux is given as a diagonistic of the decaying particle model for the forthcoming Pierre Auger project.Comment: 25 pages (Revtex) incl. 10 figures (epsf); Minor changes to reflect version accepted for publicatio

The Analysis of Non-Stationary Pooled Time-Series Cross-Section-Data

It is common in macro-level research on violent crime to analyze datasets combining a cross-section (N units) with a time-series (T periods) dimension. A large body of methodological literature accumulated since the 1990s raises questions regarding the validity of conventional models for such Pooled Time-Series Cross-Section- (PTCS) data in the presence of non-stationarity (i. e. stochastic trends). Extant research shows that conventional techniques lead to consistent estimates only under specific conditions, and standard procedures for statistical inference do not apply. The approaches proposed in the literature to test for stochastic trends and cointegration (see the introduction to this issue) are reviewed, as well as methods for estimation and inference in the non-stationary PTCS-context. A host of procedures has been developed, including methods to take simultaneously cross-section dependence and/or structural breaks into account. Thus there are now all the tools needed for valid analyses of non-stationary PTCS-data available, although many of them need large samples to perform well. The general approach to the analysis of non-stationary PTCS-data is illustrated using a data set with robbery rates for eleven West-German federal states 1971-2004. Several meaningful long-run relationships are identified and estimated in these analyses

Margaret Fell, Reading In The Heart

In 1677 Margaret Fell composed a tract of nineteen pages, The Daughter of Sion Awakened, and Putting on Strength: She Is Arising, and Shaking Herself Out of the Dust, and Putting on Her Beautiful Garments. An attentive reading of the text shows her associative way of reading scripture, one that focuses on the imagery of the Bible as a guide to interior experience and a vocabulary for the life of the sou