OHFM at Haverford Heritage Festival

Old Haverford Friends gathered for outreach at our tent along Karakung Drive for the Haverford Township Heritage Festival on June 1st.

OHFM_Booth

Since the Meeting was founded in 1683, and the Meetinghouse dates back to about 1700, the festival featured an image of the meetinghouse on one of the glasses they were using to serve craft beer.

OHFM_BeerGlass

Photo credit: Matt Carlson (Thanks Matt!)

March 30th, Mike Brenner: A New Look at the Human Tragedy

On Sunday, March 30th, at 10:00, Mike Brenner will lead a discussion that focuses on tales from ancient Mesopotamia as ways to understand the sources of self destruction in our human condition.

Mike has been attending Old Haverford Meeting for several months. He has no prior Quaker affiliation. Trained and fully credentialed in Architecture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Mike works privately with people in an educational model, with a spiritual orientation.

Mike is writing a book, “Once Upon a Time. . .Using Our Oldest Tales to Free Ourselves” which re-tells ancient stories from Mesopotamia, not as pure myth, but as essentially factual accounts in poetic language. The stories, according to Mike, illuminate the source of all the means of self-destruction we engage in …and a possible way out of the tragic human condition.

Come and learn more about Mike’s explorations and discoveries in this fascinating forum.

“The Last Runaway,” Book Club Forum April 6th

On Sunday, April 6th at 10:00, members of Old Haverford Meeting’s Worship and Ministry Committee will lead a discussion of Trace Chevalier’s “The Last Runaway.”

Honor Bright, the main character, is a Quaker who leaves England for America. She lands in Ohio in 1850 and inadvertently gets involved with the Underground Railroad. It is a story about faith, love, family, friendship, conviction, and forging one’s individual path, often independently from family and community.

Please read the book so you can join the discussion. If you don’t want to buy it you may be able to get it from the library, or there will be a few copies available in the Meetinghouse to sign out. Ask Jana Llewellyn at

    janallewellyn [at] yahoo.com

for more details.

See you on April 6th at 10:00 at Old Haverford Friend Meeting. Forum will be followed by Meeting for Worship at 11:00.

Book Club & Discussion

On behalf of Worship and Ministry, this is just a quick announcement to let you know that we’ll be reconvening our book club discussion in late March or early April during forum. (The specific date to be announced soon.)
 
Last summer, we read Mark Sundeen’s nonfiction book, The Man Who Quit Money.
 
This time around, we’ll be reading a novel, Trace Chevalier’s The Last Runaway. Honor Bright, the main character, is a Quaker who gets involved with the Underground Railroad.
 
Here’s a description from Goodreads:

In New York Times bestselling author Tracy Chevalier’s newest historical saga, she introduces Honor Bright, a modest English Quaker who moves to Ohio in 1850, only to find herself alienated and alone in a strange land. Sick from the moment she leaves England, and fleeing personal disappointment, she is forced by family tragedy to rely on strangers in a harsh, unfamiliar landscape.

Nineteenth-century America is practical, precarious, and unsentimental, and scarred by the continuing injustice of slavery. In her new home Honor discovers that principles count for little, even within a religious community meant to be committed to human equality.

However, drawn into the clandestine activities of the Underground Railroad, a network helping runaway slaves escape to freedom, Honor befriends two surprising women who embody the remarkable power of defiance. Eventually she must decide if she too can act on what she believes in, whatever the personal costs.

A powerful journey brimming with color and drama, The Last Runaway is Tracy Chevalier’s vivid engagement with an iconic part of American history.

 
You may purchase the book from a bookstore or online retailer, get it from the library, or we will have a few copies available in the meetinghouse to sign out. A few of us also have copies we can loan.

New Windows and New Cushions

On Saturday, Kyle will begin installing the new windows purchased for the First Day School area, Library and Kitchen. These new windows provide much better thermal insulation than the old ones, which should reduce our fossil fuel usage for heating this space. Please bear with us as we make these improvements.

Also, on Wednesday Feb 19, our new bench cushions arrived and were installed. We are working with a church in Philadelphia to see if they might be able to make use of our old cushions which are still serviceable if no one has allergies to horsehair.

Hello world!

Well Friends, we’ve updated our website to use WordPress rather than Drupal.  Hopefully this will allow more of you to be involved in maintaining the content on this site.  If you’d like to try it out, see me at Meeting and we’ll set you up with an account.

235 E. Eagle Rd. Havertown PA