Friends and Alcohol: Recovering a Forgotten Testimony

by Robert Levering

Overview

Friends have expressed strong concerns about the use and abuse of alcohol for more than three hundred years. Nearly all yearly meetings have advices and queries on the subject. For instance, Pacific Yearly Meeting asks Friends: "Are our lives so filled by the Spirit that we are free of the use of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs, and of excesses of any kind?" Yet many contemporary Friends find such queries quaint at best. In an article in Quaker Life, Sabron R. Newton, a Chicago Friend, wrote that she knows a number of new Quakers who thought that "we laid down our 'temperance testimony' long ago--if not when we put aside the broadbrims and bonnets, then certainly by the time the nation repealed Prohibition."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940157160197
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	03/22/2017
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #313
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	108 KB

About the Author

Robert Levering’s interest in Quaker social testimonies dates from the Vietnam war era when he worked for peace on the staff of the American Friends Service Committee, A Quaker Action Group, and Friends Peace Committee (Philadelphia Yearly Meeting). A graduate of Swarthmore College and the Martin Luther King Jr. School of Social Change, he currently earns his living by writing books about corporate America and workplace issues. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Amy Lyman and his son Reuben. Amy and Robert are members of San Francisco Friends Meeting where Reuben attends First Day School.

Robert wishes to express special thanks to Sabron Reynolds Newton as well as to Mary Ellen Chijioke and the staff of the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College. He also wishes to thank others who critiqued earlier drafts of this pamphlet, including the Adult Religious Education study group at his meeting.