Inclusion

June 8, 2025 To Friends Everywhere, Over the past five decades, Friends have become more and more welcoming of diversity in sexual orientation and gender identity. For example, in 1992, North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM) found unity to say: “We find that the Spirit of God is present in all loving relationships, regardless of the genders of those involved. <...> Our love and support is for all persons and is not based on the gender of the person they love.” And in 2017, NPY

Lewis Steller created this zine to explore the ways that the traditional Quaker understanding of "Holding in the Light," a spiritual practice related to intercessory prayer, can be expanded to allow a broader range of understandings of how the Divine or Spirit can support us. This expansion can help reduce unnecessary pain that centuries of contrasting “good” light with “bad” dark can bring upon people who are racialized targets of white supremacy culture. "I'm Holding You in

Each traditional Quaker testimony – simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship of resources and the Earth – compels us as Quakers in North America to understand and acknowledge all of the ways that we have participated in and benefitted from the dispossession of Indigenous lands and destruction of Indigenous cultures. In the past and in the present, by things we have done and left undone, we have embraced violence against the Indigenous nations who had