A Gathering of Spirits: The Friends General Conferences 1896-1950

This sweeping book tells about the development of Friends General Conference up to 1950, primarily through the lens of the Conferences. It is the story of resurgence among liberal Hicksite yearly meetings, which had been in steady numerical decline over the nineteenth century. It shows that a proto-liberal, progressive element was part of the Seeker scene that became Friends in the 1650s, and that the Great Separation among American Friends in the 1820s freed that element to chart its own course, with great fruitfulness. One central motif is that the biennial Conferences renewed the courage and resolve of Friends to face the daunting disappointments of the first half of the 20th century. Modernity promised such great advances in human society, and no one was more confident of progress than FGC Friends at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. But the melancholy of two world wars, the capitalist debacle of the Great Depression, and the stubborn blights of American raci