As co-chairs of the Canadian Friends Historical Association (CFHA), it is with great pleasure that we, Jeff Dudiak and Gord Thompson, welcome CFHA members and website visitors to our blog.
This blog opens up exciting opportunities for dialogue and information sharing. Most CFHA members will be familiar with our two publications, The Meetinghouse newsletter and the Canadian Quaker History Journal. Popular as these high-quality publications have been, they have limited our capacity to share information quickly. Most importantly, they do not facilitate engaged dialogue between interested readers across large geographic spaces in the way we hope our blog will.
We look forward to hosting lively moderated discussions incorporating your questions, comments, and contributions. At the same time we will seek to provide timely news of events, new document transcriptions, recent publications, updates on collections, family history, and other research.
We expect many of our contributions and much of our blog content will relate to the Canadian experience, but any Quaker-related contributions or questions are welcome.
We welcome and anticipate questions and discussions related to principles and practices historically observed and evolved by Canadian Quakers and the wider Quaker community. CFHA regularly receives enquiries concerning the origins and tenets of Quaker faith and practice.
The CFHA mission sets out two goals: “to preserve and communicate the history and faith of Friends (Quakers) and their contribution to Canadian Society.” Although it can be challenging to communicate “faith,” we can contribute to a larger dialogue by explaining Quaker concepts and the meaning of distinctive Quaker vocabulary. Our task is made simpler by the availability of many documents such as Books of Discipline, personal journals, and other writings created explicitly to facilitate such communication to contemporaries and generations to come.
The religious and spiritual lives of the members of historic Quaker communities expressed and express their faith in every aspect of their daily lives: social, behavioural, educational, legal, and political. Researchers, scholars, and those with only a casual connection to or interest in the Quaker experience will find a wealth of refreshing and unique perspectives on the issues of their day, and on those of ours.
Please enjoy the variety of subjects and topics included on our blog. We invite comment and contributions. You do not need to be a member to post comments to the CFHA blog, but we do ask that you register as a blog subscriber if you wish to participate.
At this time we especially wish to point you to our first official invitation for feedback and commentary. We ask you to tell us your thoughts on the two proposed panel additions to our Who Are The Quakers? series:
CFHA membership comes with the privilege of submitting materials for publication as discrete posts on the blog. Please consider sharing historical materials, research of note, upcoming events of interest, or your research, genealogy, and history questions, where educated and enthusiastic readers can help guide you towards answers and perspectives. Our editorial team will process and schedule all submissions.
You can also receive notification of new posts via email, by signing up in the right sidebar.
There is no cost to subscribe, but we do hope that those of you who become familiar with and sympathetic to our singular work and objectives will consider membership at some point.
Thank you for your viewership, and on behalf of the CFHA Executive Committee members, the editorial team, our moderator Chris Landry, and webmaster Allana Mayer, welcome to the CFHA blog!
Jeff Dudiak, Co-Chair
Gordon Thompson, Co-Chair
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