Open to New Light: Quakers and Other Faiths (Quaker Quicks series), Eleanor Nesbitt, Christian Alternative, 2023
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: Reviewed by Rhiannon GrantThis is an accessible overview of the relationships between Quakers and other religions, including their historical development and current positions.In fourteen short chapters, Nesbitt provides information about how Quakers have approached other faiths in the past and how they undertake this work in the present.She starts by exploring interfaith encounters in the early movement (from their origins in seventeenth century England, Quakers read, wrote, traveled, and sought out different groups at home, so the first generation of Quakers had contact with both Jewish and Muslim communities).She then intersperses chapters on Quaker relations with specific traditions (Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Jains, Sikhs, Baha'is, indigenous religions, and humanists) with chapters on the development of Quaker approaches (history, representation in Quaker books of discipline, interfaith approaches and initiatives), and finishes with a chapter called "Looking Forward, Looking Back," which comments on the ways in which her branch of the Quaker movement, often known as the liberal branch, is changing and engaging more deeply in interfaith encounters.This is followed by a references section longer than some of the chapters, with many useful pointers for readers who want to explore further.The greatest strength of this book is the way in which it weaves together multiple sources and time periods in order to build a clear narrative about the shape and development of Quaker relationships with other faiths.Accurate and well-resourced, it takes the reader through the sometimes complex changes in relationships with a deft hand.For example, the chapter on Jews begins in the seventeenth century and ends in the twenty-first, having taken in questions of supersessionism, work supporting refugees during the Holocaust, the experience of people who are both Quaker and Jewish, and responses to the situation in Israel and Palestine.Given that the chapter is only five pages long, and that each of these topics receives due attention, a plain and comprehensible explanation, and quotations from original sources when relevant, this book is a masterpiece of concise and straightforward writing.It also moves fluidly between understanding faiths as religious traditions (including a range of traditions well beyond those often called "world religions," and accepting that "faith" does not require a specific belief) and understanding faith as a personal experience, so that people who have experience of multiple religious belonging or spiritual fluidity of
Source: The journal of dialogic ethics :
DOI: 10.5840/jde2024317
Author: Rhiannon Grant
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4401649175