Judith Favor

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BOOK REVIEW: What We Owe the Future

August 24, 2023 By Judith Favor

What We Owe the Future bookcover image

Reviewed by Judith Wright Favor

in Friends Journal — August 2023 Issue

What We Owe the Future introduced me to “longtermism”: “the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.” And each of us has a part to play. In his concluding message, as he does throughout the book, author William MacAskill addresses the reader directly in reflecting on the previous ten chapters:

We’ve met some people who’ve made a difference in this book: abolitionists, feminists, and environmentalists; writers, politicians, and scientists. Looking back on them as figures from “history,” they can seem different from you and me. But they weren’t different: they were everyday people, with their own problems and limitations, who nevertheless decided to try to shape the history they were a part of, and who sometimes succeeded. You can do this, too.”

Friends drawn to longtermism—“a movement of morally motivated people, concerned about the whole scope of the future”—will appreciate MacAskill’s views. This mind-bending young activist challenges all of us to practice radical collaboration in shaping a more sustainable future.

Queries throughout What We Owe the Future sparked my imagination in thinking about “which values will guide the future.” MacAskill points to the favorable answer when he suggests, “Those values could be narrow-minded, parochial, and unreflective. Or they could be open-minded, ecumenical, and morally exploratory.” The author’s lifestyle earned my respect. MacAskill, who was only 28 when he joined the faculty of Oxford University, becoming the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world, lives communally, eats minimally, and donates generously to progressive nonprofit organizations. I like knowing that he is an activist and social entrepreneur; he also cofounded the nonprofits Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and 80,000 Hours, which together have moved over $200 million to effective charities, according to his website.

“We are now living through the global equivalent of the Hundred Schools of Thought,” he writes, referring to the golden age of Chinese philosophy in the sixth century when many great thinkers “were developing their ideas and trying to persuade the political elite of their theories.” MacAskill observes that likewise today “[d]ifferent moral worldviews are competing, and no single worldview has yet won out.” He gives hope for present-day actions setting humankind on the right track:

If we can improve the values that guide the behaviour of generations to come, we can be pretty confident that they will take better actions, even if they’re living in a world very different from our own, the nature of which we cannot predict.”

What We Owe the Future masterfully traces the grand sweep of history while outlining key values for designing a livable future. I commend MacAskill’s solid research and illuminating prose. His teachings about value lock-in and artificial general intelligence broadened my perspective and made me smarter. His perspective equips me to write a fuller version of my ethical will in progress, an ABC of legacy letters conveying my core values to the next generation.

MacAskill’s accessible language brings future people into the conversation while highlighting past strategies employed by controversial Friends like abolitionist Benjamin Lay. He reminds readers about the long arc to abolish slavery; he references the first public denouncement, which came from Quakers in 1688 with the Germantown petition. Success took hundreds of years. “Abolition freed millions of people from lives of utter misery,” though some countries did not abolish slavery until after 1960. In this same vein, MacAskill writes:

We may not see longtermism’s biggest impacts in our lifetimes. But by advocating for longtermism, we can pass the baton to those who will succeed us—those who might run faster, see farther, and achieve more than we ever could.”

The book ends with six pages of acknowledgements that credit hundreds of people, and a useful website: whatweowethefuture.com.

Let us see what forethought can do.


Judith Wright Favor is an elder member of Claremont Monthly, Southern California Quarterly, and Pacific Yearly Meetings. She recently led a workshop on the elements of writing an ethical will at the Friends General Conference Gathering.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Essays Tagged With: Climate Change, Ecology, Friends Journal, Longtermism, Quakers

BOOK REVIEW: The School That Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler
by Deborah Cadbury

February 2, 2023 By Judith Favor

Reviewed by Judith Favor

Bookcover image of The School That Escaped the Nazis-The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler

by Deborah Cadbury | Public Affairs, 2022 | 464 pages | $30/hardcover | $17.99/eBook

The School That Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler shows what love can do in wartime. Deborah Cadbury takes readers on an emotional journey with head teacher Anna Essinger, who smuggled 70 students out of Nazi Germany—“a feat that no other teacher managed to pull off”—and settled in a rundown manor house in England. Some pages read like a novel; most read like accounts from a worship-sharing group of former students gathered to recall common experiences.

Essinger (1879–1960) grew up in a large Jewish German family. At college in Wisconsin, she was drawn to Quaker humanitarian and compassionate values. After WWI, she joined U.S. Quakers in Quäkerspeisung, an ambitious post-war relief plan to feed schoolchildren in Germany. Full of hope to make a difference at home, Essinger returned to “devastating deprivation.” As a liaison for the Quaker feeding program, she visited hundreds of schools throughout Germany where she was appalled by teaching methods of dominance that instilled fear and conformity in children.

In 1926, Essinger and family opened a progressive school in Germany, a musical oasis with studies grounded in kindness where students could learn at their own pace. By 1933, Nazi persecution led her to decide: “I could no longer raise children in honesty and freedom [here].” That’s when she hatched the daring plan to take her pupils to Kent. There Essinger created “a home-school,” a sanctuary where they could “not only recover but . . . aspire to the very highest levels. . . . And she would make their lives count.”

Throughout WWII, the residential school took in traumatized Jewish children who arrived on Kindertransport. Most never saw their parents again. Behind the scenes, Essinger worked with the Red Cross and relief committees to get answers. Staff “carefully managed how they broke any news of parents.”

Pupils who survived the Holocaust offer moving firsthand testimony in these pages. “It took a great deal of love and determination to help us,” wrote one of the survivors looking back on that time. Another pupil, named Sidney Finkel, had, by age 14, “endured the killing of his family in Poland, the ‘liquidation’ of his ghetto, slave labour camps, concentration camps and typhus. He had lost all concept of normal living.” Essigner sat “with him during mealtimes and taught him how to eat and to stop bolting his food.”

She was “‘not in the least bit religious,’” observed one of Essinger’s first pupils, Susanne Trachsler. “‘Not even Jewish.’” Cadbury further explains:

Anna came from an assimilated Jewish family and did not place great emphasis on religions beliefs and practices, although she did adopt one custom she had observed in Quaker circles: before dinner, each child held hands with the pupils standing either side of them for a moment of silent reflection, the entire school briefly linked as one. It was instilled in the children that they must help each other.

Essinger “managed to establish ‘a kind of honour code,’ continued Susanne. ‘I don’t know how she did it. The worst thing you could do was lie and cheat.’” The children who did behave badly were hardly disciplined by the staff because, as Susanne Trachsler recalled, “The other pupils themselves treated them with such contempt that they stopped immediately. . . . We sort of educated each other.”

In reflecting on the shared courage of these individuals, I’m reminded of a quote from Quaker mystic and social activist Rufus M. Jones in The Luminous Trail: “Nobody knows how the kindling flame of life and power leaps from one life to another. What is the magic quality in a person which instantly awakens faith?”

Quaker educators will value this historic account of Anna Essinger and colleagues who met the crisis during a dark moment in history, and kept the lights on. The School That Escaped the Nazis illumines how a prepared group of adults transformed the hearts and minds of traumatized children. I suggest a more Friendly subtitle: The True Story of a Luminous Trail of Teachers Who Transcended Hitler.

Buy from QuakerBooks


Judith Favor, an author from the Claremont Meeting in California,
appreciates Deborah Cadbury’s keen research and muscular writing.

image logotype Friends Journal

 

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Quakers Tagged With: Deborah Cadbury, Friends Journal, Quakers

Book Review: “Living Fellowship Needs Fresh Forms”
by Daphne Clement

October 12, 2022 By Judith Favor

During the pandemic, Daphne Clement, retired hospice chaplain and coordinator of spiritual care, began each day in worship on Zoom. For 19 months, waiting worship transformed COVID-19 lockdown into a life-sustaining spiritual retreat for Friends who gathered in collective connectedness.

“We are witness to the formation of an amazing technological society that has risen to meet the need for communion among Friends during the past year and a half of the pandemic,” Clement writes. “And we morning worshipers are so grateful for the innovation.”

She wonders about the future, inviting Friends to reflect on their own circumstances: “So, will our everyday Zoom worship endure?” Clement asks. “Is digital worship the new way of life?”

Living Fellowship Needs Fresh Forms

Filed Under: Book Reviews, News, Quakers Tagged With: Friends Journal, published, Spirituality & Practice, testimonial

Walk With Me — Book Review

August 3, 2022 By Judith Favor

Composite Image of Friends Journal August 22 Cover and Page 35 "Walk With Me Book Review" by Judith Favor
Judith Wright Favor portrait photoReviewer Judith Wright Favor is an elder member of Claremont Monthly, Southern California Quarterly, and Pacific Yearly Meetings. Her latest publication is the Pendle Hill pamphlet: Friending Rosie on Death Row.

You can read this Book Review online by following this link:

Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Essays, Quakers Tagged With: biography, Democracy, Friends Journal, Quakers, testimonial, writing

Review of Friending Rosie Pamphlet in Friends Journal

August 3, 2022 By Judith Favor

Image of the Book Review title and text in Friends Journal for the book review of the Friending Rosie Pamphlet
Judith Wright Favor portrait photo
READ MORE:

Friending Rosie on Death Row

FULL TEXT:

The Pendle Hill pamphlet Friending Rosie on Death Row documents a 20-year friendship between a non-incarcerated Quaker and a formerly Catholic woman who was condemned to die for murder. (There is also a longer book with a similar name, Friending Rosie: Respect on Death Row, available from Page Publishing. It includes more of Rosie’s first-person views and is targeted to a general audience.) Author Judith Favor draws on her own memories as well as letters Maria del Rosio Alfaro (Rosie) wrote to her from death row in Central California Women’s Facility. Alfaro permitted Favor to publish certain pieces of correspondence while requesting others be kept private.

Favor explains that she and Alfaro want to encourage others to commit to friendships that transcend barriers of privilege, race, class, and criminal justice system involvement.

Stories like ours help us answer some of life’s big hows and whys: What makes people commit impulsive acts of violence? How can one awful choice disrupt so many lives? How can we mend past mistakes? Where is love in all this?

Favor recounts a conversation in which Alfaro, convicted of fatally stabbing nine-year-old Autumn Wallace while drug impaired and sentenced to die in a gas chamber, weeps as she recalls the day of the crime. Favor explains that discussing the details of the murder is not the purpose of her writing. Rather she intends to demonstrate how loving connections can transcend any issues resulting from a dark past.

Reading about Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker prisoner advocate in nineteenth-century Britain, inspired Favor to correspond with an incarcerated woman. Raised Protestant, Favor discovered Quaker advices and queries while unemployed and avoiding homelessness by staying with a Friend who worshiped at Palo Alto Meeting in California. Quaker testimonies inspired her to affirm the spiritual worth of every person by befriending someone behind bars. Favor re-envisioned the prophet Micah’s age-old question “What does the Lord require of you?” to read “What does Love require of you?” The answer given in the book of Micah is “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (6:8 NASB). Cultivating a friendship with Alfaro enabled Favor to practice justice, kindness, and humility.

The women confide in each other in letters and during visits. Alfaro tells Favor about a fight she engaged in as well as the prevalence of drug abuse in the prison. She describes her daily activities and remarks on the ceaseless, deafening noise. Favor tells Alfaro about her divorce, and Alfaro responds with compassion:

I’m very sorry to hear about your divorce. I don’t even know what to say, my heart goes out to you and him. Tell me, friend, how are you handling this? I don’t know what made you both do what you’re doing, but all I can say is that I’m here for you. I know that at times it feels good to talk to someone about our problems, and vent to let it out. So if ever you feel that, please know I’m here for you.

The pamphlet challenges readers to ask what we can do to step outside of comfortable social circles and engage with incarcerated people who we might not initially think of as potential friends. It invites us to explore how we can acknowledge that of God in everyone.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Quakers Tagged With: Friending Rosie, Friends Journal, Quakers, writing

Review: The Sun Does Shine:
How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

October 30, 2018 By Judith Favor

By Anthony Ray Hinton with Lara Love Hardin

St. Martin’s Press, 2018. 272 pages.
$26.99/hardcover; $16.99/paperback (available June 2019); $13.99/eBook.

Reviewed by Judith Favor on October 1, 2018 in Friends Journal

The Sun Does Shine is the true story of an innocent black man’s unjust conviction, his despair on Alabama’s death row, and his practice of peacemaking behind bars. In “The Death Squad” chapter, Anthony Ray Hinton’s anguish is palpable as he describes men in chains being walked past his cell to the electric chair. He leads inmates to bang on the bars of their cells during electrocutions, raising a holy ruckus of accompaniment and protest.

Hinton eased racial grudges and grievances by aiding KKK and African American inmates alike. “A book club will help things stay more peaceful,” he told the warden, pointing out that reading books would be a good way for the men to quietly spend time and focus on something other than the negative aspects of life on death row. He also added, “I do think it will help [the guards] have an easier time doing their jobs.” His resourcefulness led to the first death row book club. In chapters titled “Love Is a Foreign Language” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” Hinton reveals which authors forged community between black and white convicts.

I was disappointed in two aspects of The Sun Does Shine. My friend Rosie on death row cannot read it, because hardcover books are forbidden in her facility (and in many others too). My greater hurt is all the women missing from the afterword. Preceding nine pages of “the men and women who sit on death row in this country” (as of March 2017) listed in “Pray for Them by Name,” Hinton writes:

Statistically, one out of every ten men on this list is innocent.… Read these names. Know their stories.… The moral arc of the universe needs people to support it as it bends.… Read the names out loud. After every tenth name, say, “Innocent.” … The death penalty is broken, and you are either part of the Death Squad or you are banging on the bars. Choose.

He chose a provocative way to conclude, but I am pained that, for some reason, the women on death row in Central California Women’s Facility and other facilities are not acknowledged.

During the author’s reading at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, I was moved by his honesty, his vulnerability, and his simplicity. Hinton’s true voice is inscribed on every page, and his tears, too. Three relationships kept him going through 30 years of wrongful incarceration: his mother’s unconditional love, his friend Lester’s faithful visits, and legal advocate Bryan Stevenson’s commitment to setting him free. Stevenson, the author of Just Mercy, took Hinton’s case to the Supreme Court where all nine justices confirmed his innocence. That day at the bookstore, Hinton gave the crowd one closing bit of advice: “If you ever get arrested for a crime you didn’t commit, do two things. Pray first, then make your 911 call directly to Bryan Stevenson.”

The Sun Does Shine may deepen the commitment of Friends working for prison reform, offer fresh insights to Friends conducting Alternatives to Violence Project workshops with inmates, and perhaps inspire new AVP volunteers.

https://www.friendsjournal.org/the-sun-does-shine-anthony-ray-hinton-lara-love-hardin/

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: Friends Journal

Review of Wolf Hollow By Lauren Wolk

January 16, 2017 By Judith Favor

Reviewed by Judith Favor December 1, 2016, in Friends Journal
Wolf Hollow Book Cover Image

Dutton Children’s Books, 2016
294 pages
$16.99/hardcover; $10.99/eBook

“The year I turned twelve, I learned how to lie. I don’t mean the small fibs that children tell. I mean real lies fed by real fears––things I said and did that took me out of the life I’d always known and put me down hard into a new one.”

In Wolf Hollow, Lauren Wolk introduces a girl who becomes brave and good in the face of something terrible. In 1943, Annabelle lives among people who love her in the hills of rural Pennsylvania, a place she loves.  She enjoys a steady life until a dark-hearted girl comes to her hills and changes everything. After Betty punches her and threatens greater hurts, Annabelle finds ways to protect herself and her little brothers by seeking inner guidance.

Toby, a scarred veteran of the first war, lives in the woods nearby.  He looks odd and rarely speaks, but Annabelle senses his kindness. She tries to protect Toby from the lying girl who manipulates people into blaming him for the cruelties she has inflicted. Tensions mount when Betty disappears and Toby, suspected of kidnapping her, takes off.  As men and dogs search for the missing girl and man, Annabelle searches her conscience and finds courage to speak the truth, a young voice calling for justice.

Lauren Wolk is an award-winning poet and author of the adult novel Those Who Favor Fire.  In Wolf Hollow she writes an indelible account of a reflective child who stands strong on behalf of others.  Although this compelling story of moral complexity and quiet heroism is marketed to third through seventh graders, I commend it to Friends of all ages, particularly librarians, First Day teachers, parents and grandparents.

To sum up the power of Wolf Hollow, I affirm the view of Julie Strauss-Gabel, President and Publisher of Dutton Children’s Books: “The stories that lay bare the ugliness of our world are also the stories that stay with us. They inspire acts of everyday bravery and turn small voices big.”


Judith Favor also lives in a place she loves, among people at Claremont Monthly Meeting who love her. She looks forward to reading Wolf Hollow to her grandkids and, some fine day, to her first great-grandchild.

http://www.friendsjournal.org/wolf-hollow/

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: Friends Journal

Review of Colum McCann’s Trans Atlantic

September 20, 2014 By Judith Favor

columMcCannTRANS ATLANTIC

By Colum McCann
Random House, New York, 2013
Hardback, 305 pages   $27.00

Reviewed by Judith Favor.  Published in Friends Journal, September 2014, pp 42-43

I yearn for writing that is transformational, and this beautifully crafted novel met my longing.  Colum McCann braids together the passions of publicly acclaimed men – abolitionist former slave Frederick Douglass, WW1 pilots Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown and peacemaker Senator George Mitchell—with the private stories of feisty fictional women.  McCann brings his characters to life through exquisite prose, gifting the reader with story lines that arc across the centuries and crisscross the Atlantic, interweaving Irish and American views and values.

Memorable scenes pulse with Quaker testimonies.  In 1845 Irish maid Lily Duggan crosses paths with Frederick Douglass whose integrity and commitment to equality inspire her to escape servitude, sail to America and nurse wounded soldiers on a Civil War battlefield.   The novel follows her daughter Emily and granddaughter Lottie whose journeys mirror the progress and shape of history.   In 1919 they are influenced by two aviators who set course for Ireland, attempting a nonstop trans-Atlantic flight in a bomber they modified for peaceful means, a flight designed to heal the wounds of the Great War.

In 1998 Lottie encounters Senator George Mitchell in Belfast as he labors to negotiate the historic Good Friday Peace Accords.   Mitchell granted the author access to his inner reflections, making para bellum a profoundly moving chapter, worthy of repeated readings.  Mitchell’s inner light shines through McCann’s poignant portrait of the contemporary peacemaker who embodies simplicity, equality and integrity under intense international public pressure.

TransAtlantic is not a quick read.  McCann’s truthful, tender pages invite pauses for deep thinking, remembering past peacemakers and imagining a more simple, just and equitable future.  There is so much goodwill, humor and pure life force in every chapter that this book will lift the spirit of Friends and meet the hunger for transformational fiction.

Judith Favor is a member of Claremont Friends Meeting in Southern California.
Literary fiction seeded with Friends’ testimonies feeds her hungry soul.
 

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: Friends Journal

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