This book examines the nearly 400-year tradition of Quaker engagements with mystical ideas and sources. It provides a fresh assessment of the way tradition and social context can shape a religious community while interplaying with historical and theological antecedents within the tradition. Quaker concepts such as "Meeting," the "Light," and embodied spirituality, have led Friends to develop an interior spirituality that intersects with extra-Quaker sources, such as those found in Jakob Boehme, Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl, the Continental Quietists, Kabbalah, Buddhist thought, and Luyia indigenous religion. Through time and across cultures, these and other conversations have shaped Quaker self-understanding and, so, expanded previous models of how religious ideas take root within a tradition. The thinkers engaged in this globally-focused, interdisciplinary volume include George Fox, James Nayler, Robert Barclay, Elizabeth Ashbridge, John Woolman, Hannah Whitall Smith, Rufus Jones, Inazo Nitobe, Howard Thurman, and Gideon W. H. Mweresa, among others.

This book examines the nearly 400-year tradition of Quaker engagements with mystical ideas and sources. It provides a fresh assessment of the way tradition and social context can shape a religious community while interplaying with historical and theological antecedents within the tradition. Quaker concepts such as "Meeting," the "Light," and embodied spirituality, have led Friends to develop an interior spirituality that intersects with extra-Quaker sources, such as those found in Jakob Boehme, Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl, the Continental Quietists, Kabbalah, Buddhist thought, and Luyia indigenous religion. Through time and across cultures, these and other conversations have shaped Quaker self-understanding and, so, expanded previous models of how religious ideas take root within a tradition. The thinkers engaged in this globally-focused, interdisciplinary volume include George Fox, James Nayler, Robert Barclay, Elizabeth Ashbridge, John Woolman, Hannah Whitall Smith, Rufus Jones, Inazo Nitobe, Howard Thurman, and Gideon W. H. Mweresa, among others.

In 1758, a Quaker tailor and sometime shopkeeper and school teacher stood up in a Quaker meeting and declared that the time had come for Friends to reject the practice of slavery. That man was John Woolman, and that moment was a significant step, among many, toward the abolition of slavery in the United States. Woolman's antislavery position was only one essential piece of his comprehensive theological vision for colonial American society. Drawing on Woolman's entire body of writing, Jon R. Kershner reveals that the theological and spiritual underpinnings of Woolman's alternative vision for the British Atlantic world were nothing less than a direct, spiritual christocracy on earth, what Woolman referred to as "the Government of Christ." Kershner argues that Woolman's theology is best understood as apocalypticcentered on a supernatural revelation of Christ's immediate presence governing all aspects of human affairs, and envisaging the impending victory of God's reign over apostasy. John Woolman and the Government of Christ explores the theological reasoning behind Woolman's critique of the burgeoning trans-Atlantic economy, slavery, and British imperial conflicts, and fundamentally reinterprets 18th-century Quakerism by demonstrating the continuing influence of early Quaker apocalypticism.