Welcome to Spirit Rising on the web

...follow how joy and pain, searching and conversion, conviction and questioning, weave cacophony into jazz.

- Margaret Fraser Executive Secretary, Friends World Committee for Consultation Section of the Americas

These are true, and real words of the young generation which we have to nurture and support to grow.

-Bainito Wamalwa clerk of the Young Quaker Christian Association (Africa)

Spirit rises like heat rises. It just does....The evidence of this truth is on every page of this volume.

Peggy Senger Parsons, pastor, Freedom Friends Church, Salem, Oregon, USA

...a reminder that God is at work in this world and that our little Society's contributions in encouraging the life of the Spirit continue...

-Brent Bill, author of Sacred Compass and Holy Silence, USA

I have been amazed and inspired by this book: its depth, its prophetic ministry, its variety of languages, cultures, and theologies. Above all, it has given me hope about Friends and our future.

-Harvey Gillman

A Vibrant and Intergenerational Quakerism: An Interview with Angelina Conti

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Interviewed by David Kosbob

I first heard of Quakers United in Publication’s Quaker Youth Book Project back in the spring of 2008 via Facebook. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but there was a call for submissions of writing and art by young Quakers from across the theological spectrum. As a young(ish) Friend who’s dabbled in art here and there, it caught my eye. I looked into it a little further and found that a few friends of mine were involved in putting the project together. It seemed they were knee-deep in assembling an anthology attempting to collect young Quaker voices far and wide, from every corner of the Society. It sounded ambitious. I never did end up submitting anything, but I kept the book project on my radar. I thought something interesting might come of it.

Flash-forward two years to the summer of 2010. I’ve just begun interning at FGC QuakerBooks and Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices is everywhere. The Book Project’s ambition produced a mammoth volume of art and writing that spoke to a lot of people. I read a little bit and what I took away from it was a sense of the richness and vast depths saturating these young Quaker writers and artists. There was a real expanse to this volume; nothing was left out. It made me reflect on all the different ways people can be Quaker. It also made me think about generations in our faith. Looking back, it was fitting that I first heard about the project through Facebook, such a generational curio.

I was asked to conduct an interview with someone concerning Spirit Rising and was given the name Angelina Conti. Angelina was the book’s project coordinator and a member of the editorial board. Currently she’s a teacher at the Woolman Semester out in California, but fortunately I was able to catch her on a visit back to her old place of employment, at FGC here in Philadelphia. Angelina has herself conducted a number of wonderful interviews which you can find on this site, and I was happy to give her the chance to be on the other side of the voice recorder.

Quaker Bridge-Building

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An Introduction by Kody Hersh

In the first years of the Quaker movement, pairs of minister-evangelists set out from England to places around the world, crossing oceans and continents on trips that lasted months or years, to deliver the Quaker message as widely as they could. They crossed cultural and linguistic barriers apparently without hesitation, speaking the Truth that God gave them.... Read More


Sarah Katreen Hoggatt and John Epur Lomuria

Last December, the manuscript of Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices, an international anthology of writing and art by young adult Friends from across the Quaker theological spectrum, was being typeset and readied for publication.  However, at that time we, two of the editorial board members for the project, John and Sarah, were in the middle of a desert swimming in Lake Turkana, and the book was one of the last things on both of our minds.  We had already read the manuscript and given feedback before meeting up with each other in Bungoma, Kenya to attend the Young Quakers Christian Association of Africa Triennial.  After having helped create the book, our main focus was now on living out the kind of relationships we want this book to bring about.

Throughout both the times we've met with the rest of the editorial board, we have learned what it means to have relationships across a wide spectrum of cultural and spiritual beliefs.  We've learned how to discuss the hard issues while holding others in love and acceptance.  It is hard work but for both of us, it has always been worth it.  Such discussions have changed us, changed our viewpoints about each other and

The Canadian Friend Young Friends Issue

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The Summer 2010 issue of The Canadian Friend is focused on Young Friends and is packed to the gills with Spirit Rising content. Many pieces from the book are featured as articles in the issue, and three of the books editors, Sarah Hoggatt, Harriet Hart, and Katrina Mcquail, offer their reflections at the end of the issue. Sherryll-Jeanne Harris, editor of the magazine, has some nice things to say in her Editor's Corner, and she writes a piece about the 2010 Quakers United in Publications (QUIP) conference, at which Spirit Rising was a large prescence (the book was a joint project of both QuakerPress and QUIP).

The whole issue is online and can be read at The Canadian Friends website.  

Young Quakers Are Speaking

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The following was written on May 3rd, 2010 by C. Wess Daniels for his blog Gathering in Light. These are his thoughts on the convergent nature of the book, reproduced here with permission.

Two weeks ago I was in Indiana for the book release party for the book I helped get published: Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices. I’ve written about Spirit Rising and the Quaker Youth Book Project over the last couple years. I was one of ten young Quaker editors on the board who all worked hard together to solicit material from the book from many countries from around the world and give what we felt was the best representation of at least some of those voices. The book is now out and it’s beautiful, it’s something I’m proud of, and it’s something I’m glad to have my name attached to. It was itself a labor of love, it was very difficult at times, and many of us on the editorial board wanted to throw in the towel at one point or another over that last two years. We labored through this process (yes, we also had fun), so this book feels in a way like it was really “birthed.”

Book Release

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The following was written on April 24, 2010 by Sarah Hoggatt, one of the books editors, for her blog Walking the Sea. These are her reflections after the book release, reproduced here with permission. 

Yesterday was a very full day. After breakfast, I led a workshop on Writing as Prayer. Personally, I love workshops that are more interactive and so I lead my own in that manner, a style the attendees appreciated. We had good discussion and good questions. I really enjoyed the time we got to spend together.

In the afternoon, Angelina, our project coordinator, presented her report to QUIP and then our editorial board left to do some of the hard work this book keeps us coming back to. We know we are asking the people who read the book some very hard questions but please know, we understand how hard these questions are to grapple with because we have asked them of ourselves and each other first. We are hoping our own work together can be a model for what others can do between themselves.

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