Quakers and Mysticism: Comparative and Syncretic Approaches to Spirituality [Paperback]

This book examines the nearly 400-year tradition of Quaker engagements with mystical ideas and sources. It provides a fresh assessment of the way tradition and social context can shape a religious community while interplaying with historical and theological antecedents within the tradition. Quaker concepts such as Meeting, the Light, and embodied spirituality, have led Friends to develop an interior spirituality that intersects with extra-Quaker sources, such as those found in Jakob Boehme, Abk Bakr ibn Tufayl, the Continental Quietists, Kabbalah, Buddhist thought, and Luyia indigenous religion. Through time and across cultures, these and other conversations have shaped Quaker self-understanding and, so, expanded previous models of how religious ideas take root within a tradition. The thinkers engaged in this globally-focused, interdisciplinary volume include George Fox, James Nayler, Robert Barclay, Elizabeth Ashbridge, John Woolman, Hannah Whitall Smith, Rufus Jones, Inazo Nitobe, Howard Thurman, and Gideon W. H. Mweresa, among others.

1) Introduction: Quaker Engagements with Mysticism.- 2) Meeting: The Mystical Legacy of George Fox.- 3) James Nayler and Jacob Boehmes The Way to Christ.- 4) How Ecology, Economics, and Ethics Brought Winstanley and Nitobe to Quakerism.- 5) Robert Barclay and Kabbala.- 6) Elizabeth Ashbridge and Spiritual Autobiography: The Old Awakened in the New.- 7) John Woolmans Christological Model of Discernment.- 8) Hannah Whitall Smiths Highway of Holiness.- 9) The Unifying Light of Allah: Ibn Tufail and Rufus Jones in Dialogue.- 10) Howard Thurman (1899-1981): Universalist Approaches to Buddhism and Quakerism.- 11) The Singing Mysticism: Kenyan Quakerism, the Case of Gideon W. H. Mweresa.- 12)  Liberal Quakers and Buddhism.- 13) Conclusion.

Jon R. Kershner teaches in the Religion department a