The Evolutionary Potential of Quakerism

The Society of Friends has a great intellectual task ahead of it, in the translation of its religious and ethical experiences and insights into a conscious understanding of the way in which the kind of love which we treasure and covet can be produced, defended, and extended. A great part of this task no doubt lies outside of the Society of Friends, for instance in the development of the social sciences. Friends however have a unique opportunity before them in the decades to come.

The principal, though not the only, growing point of the Society of Friends in the twentieth century lies in the intellectual community. It has been the university meetings which have been the main source of whatever expansion has taken place in unprogrammed Quakerism. This itself is a symptom of the evolutionary potential that still lies within the society because it is precisely the university communities which now carry the seeds of the post-civilized future. I believe the next major task of the Society of Friends is to mobilize this intellectual potential and to catch a vision of the great intellectual task to which it is called. If it can respond to this vision its evolutionary potential may be great indeed.