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Navigating cross-cultural differences while creating Spirit Rising
By Angelina Conti
In creating Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices, we attempted to make our process look as much as possible like our envisioned final product: ecumenical, multi-cultural, and international within the Society of Friends.
Guidance and inspiration for the project
For guidance and inspiration we had the work and wisdom of Friends organizations like Quakers Uniting in Publications (QUIP), which sponsored the book and its predecessor Whispers of Faith, and the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), who have been building bridges and friendship among different Friends communities for decades. There is also the long and rich history of ecumenical work among young adult Quakers that stretches back several generations: the role of Hicksite and Orthodox young adult Friends in reunification of several north American yearly meetings, the World Gathering of Young Friends and its previous incarnations, the long history of Young Friends of North America (YFNA), and the work of the Young Christian Quaker Association (YCQA) among Friends in Kenya, to name a few examples.
Navigating differences among Quakers
There are several ways to talk about how cultural, theological and geographic differences were navigated during the creation of Spirit Rising. The honest and succinct way is to say that we navigated faithfully, carefully, awkwardly, and imperfectly. That gives you some sense of the multi-year, multi-faceted process that included dozens if not hundreds of Friends around the world.
Another way is to talk about the logistics. In early 2008 QUIP formed an editorial board of 10 young adult friends from across the theological spectrum of Friends and from around the world, including Bolivia, Kenya, Canada and the United Kingdom, but with a pretty heavy and unintentional weight towards North America and US Americans. We had three editorial board meetings. At the first in Greensboro in 2008 we crafted the language in the Call for Submissions and brainstormed ways to recruit submissions. At the second, on the Oregon Coast in 2009, we made initial and substantial selections for the book and noted what was still missing an still needed to be solicited. In Richmond this past April, which was more of a conference and celebration than a meeting, we talked about how to carry on the work and how to let it go.
In all of these instances the editorial board and QUIP Friends talked. A lot. We talked in our formal meetings and in informal social situations (like bowling alleys or at the beach). Much of our time was spent parsing out the differences between our traditions and learning each other’s languages of faith. That is, though we all spoke English and conducted our meetings in English, we quickly learned that we had very different meanings and relationships to certain words and practices.
