Essays

John Cowan “I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly.”   Jesus of Nazareth Lanny and I sat quietly on a…

(a prose poem by John Cowan) A couple of decades ago, when I was about sixty-five, I foundmyself a seat in the monthly meeting of…

By John Cowan A decade or more ago I sent a poem to our Quaker Journal. It was soundly rejected. Here is the poem: The…

My Practice  By John Cowan There will be seven sections. The first will relate some wonderful spiritual events that I have experienced or heard or…

By John Cowan So, it is my first year of attending Quakers, and at a Forum someone is explaining what you do during meeting and…

By John Cowan S.C. We have just finished with Christmas and its story of God coming down in the form of a little child into…

By John Cowan (February 2020) Since about 1970 I have seen the story of Jesus become more historically accurate as the story of a man…

By John Cowan Do you know that Einstein realized the truth of the theory of relativity before he proved it? Realization came first. Math came…

                                                                             January 7 2019 Dear friend, Did I drive you out of the meeting?  You used to come for a few months pretty regularly to the…

By John Cowan In the midst of an ugly illness a friend of mine, a thinking man, found himself with nothing going on in his…

By John Cowan Sentimentality, excessive and spurious emotion. It has always seemed to me that love is a response and to affirm the existence of…

By John Cowan How many lives have you been allowed to live? One?  If so, too bad, so sad.   I have been allowed to live…

By John Cowan 3/13/15 Why are Quakers important?   I have long been convinced that the human race is destined for even greater times and the…

By John Cowan Quakers do lots of things during Worship. We daydream, sleep, plan, worry. After all it is an hour of silence broken only…