(no subject)

[da]

This morning I was up at the crack of Ugh to drop the car off at the dealer's for warranty repairs. At least, we hope they are warranty repairs- transmissions are not cheap. They've got a pretty streamlined system now; you drive into a bay, they tick stuff off on a clipboard, and shuffle you either directly to their coffee counter (supplied by a local nonprofit) or to a desk to talk more about your car. If only they had recorded the information I told them on the phone- the guy didn't know it was under warranty.

At the shop, after I collected my coffee and cookie, I ran into one of dan's collegues, Arnie V, who I also enjoyed chatting with Saturday at dan's concert. He's retiring in a year, and we talked about the difficulty of figuring out what to do next. Like dan, he doesn't really like computers even though he's a Computer Science professor. I'm sure he'll do fine, though; he likes people and puttering with woodworking, and I can totally see him working on Habitat for Humanity or some Mennonite relief program.

For me, it's frustrating that there are so many liberal Mennonites and so few Quakers in this area. So much in common, but there's this pesky... Christianity... requirement to become Mennonite. :) I enjoyed chatting with Arnie quite a bit, and we shared the shuttle-bus drive to the University as well, so it felt much shorter than an hour.

Comments

[sqrt-joy.livejournal.com]

Wait wait wait - there isn't a Christianity requirement for being a Quaker? Apparently, I need to read more.

(And I love Arnie, he's a great person)

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

This really seems to be one of the most common misconceptions of Friends (right up there with, "you didn't die off in the 1700s?").

Quakers range from Universalists (most of whom aren't Christians) to Evangelicals (who are very much Christians and really don't like our kind) to Pagan Friends (I can't find a good link to an article by a Pagan Friend; our friend Stasa runs a mailing list for them, though) to Non-theist Friends (who are, well, not theists).

Now, this doesn't mean that every one of these groups is non-controversial to every other one. [I don't care for Evangelical Friends much, and I have some issues with non-theist Friends, which mostly have to do with how we Friends make decisions, and how I don't think that's compatible with nontheism.] But there are all kinds. There's Jewish Quakers, too; that's a recently more visible group.