Our BYM speaker Chuck Fager is no stranger to controversy or facing the consequences of 'speaking truth to power'. Our American Friend has 'form'. In the 1960s civil rights campaign he worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (run by Martin Luther King, Jr.) and on three occasions was arrested - spending one night in a cell with Martin Luther King.
Chuck has had a interesting career. He has travelled around the USA, writing and studying and, after spending some years at Harvard Divinity School in the late 1960s, he turned to writing full-time and spent the next decade as a freelance, often publishing in the alternative press.
In the mid-1980s Chuck took one of those lateral routes writers sometimes find attractive - he joined the postal service and delivered mail! But the books kept coming, fiction as well as non-fiction. He worked at Pendle Hill for a time. At present he is the director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a frontline Friends' peace witness project.
Chuck's focus in the past few years has been liberal Quakerism and its development. But the main thrust of his talk for us at BYM is the future for Quakers and how it may be shaped by the inter-weaving model structures of the world wide web. Any reader at BYM caring to go along to the Drayton Room at 5.45pm on Saturday 24 May can be assured of a riveting experience and Chuck positively welcomes interaction. And you can also hear about another of his concerns at a BYM special interest group meeting with the Quaker Concern for the Abolition of Torture, on Sunday 25 May at 1pm in B19, Drayton House.

Labels: chuck fager, torture, yearly meeting