We are delighted to have a new cohort of resident Friends and scholars joining us for the 2024-25 academic year! If you find yourself on campus, please share our joy in welcoming them to Pendle Hill.
Resident Scholars
Peter Blood-Patterson has spent a diverse life as activist, Quakerism teacher, advanced practice nurse, family therapist, and promoter of communal singing among Friends and around the world. He was mentored by and received spiritual direction from Bill Taber and Parker Palmer at Pendle Hill. He has led Quakerism courses, workshops, and retreats for meetings through Philadelphia YM’s traveling teachers program and for meetings and retreat centers around the world.
Peter’s ministry of teaching and writing about Quakerism is currently under the care of Mt. Toby Friends Meeting in NEYM. Working in close collaboration with a number of leading Quaker historians and writers, he is the primary curator of the online library InwardLight.org, which has already provided free access to hundreds of Quaker pamphlets, books, and talks stretching from the beginnings of Quakerism to the present day. He has received grants from NEYM’s Legacy Gift Fund and the Obadiah Brown Benevolent Fund to develop adult Quakerism courses and the Inward Light library. Peter is a frequent contributor to Friends Journal, most recently with his article ”We Are All Held in Love: Reflections on Holding in the Light”.
As a 2025 Kenneth L. Carroll Scholar at Pendle Hill, Peter will build on his long-term belief that faith-based work of social transformation represents a form of prophecy. He will explore ways Friends today can play an important role in helping create the Kingdom of Heaven on earth — springing from God’s vision of a new creation here among us today.
John Muhanji is the Director of the Africa Ministries Office of Friends United Meeting based in Kisumu, Kenya. John and his wife Rose had three children: Kevin, Audrey & Allan. Unfortunately, we lost Allan in a motorbike accident in 2021.
John’s commitment to the African Quaker community is unwavering. As an MDIV graduate of Earlham School of Religion and a DMIN from George Fox University, he is dedicated to supporting leadership development and renewal among Friends Churches in Africa. He is a key figure in the development of the ‘African voice in the Quaker Theology’ and the promotion of spiritual formation among Quaker leaders in Africa. His efforts have significantly contributed to the expansion of Quaker missions in Tanzania, Eastern Congo, and Uganda. He wholeheartedly embraces the unity of purpose of Friends both in Africa and beyond.
During his time as the Henry J. Cadbury Scholar, John will be continuing his work to contextualize Quakerism to African culture, history, and realities while maintaining its core values and principles. Learn more about John’s existing work on this topic.
Su Penn (they/she) has been a Friend for a little over thirty years, and has served many roles in her monthly meeting, yearly meeting, and Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer Concerns (FLGBTQC). She has been a plenary speaker at FLGBTQC Midwinter Gathering and FGC Gathering, and from time to time leads a popular FGC Gathering workshop on Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself.” They have led shorter workshops on Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, and other poets, as well as weekly online generative writing workshop that participants find enriching and encouraging.
As an essayist, memoirist, and writer of creative nonfiction, Su has often written about her experiences as a Quaker for Friends Journal as well as on her own blogs. Her 2013 Friends Journal article, “We Think He Might Be a Boy” about her trans son, then five, went viral; Su is working on an update to that article as well as a reflection on her 2014 FGC Plenary, which focused on sex and sexuality.
Su’s major project currently is a memoir about her time in lesbian spaces in the 1990s, as a staffer at the iconic magazine Lesbian Connection and as a member of the Security and Communications crew at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. The decades since Su did that work have seen her deepening and growing as a Quaker, as well as the unfolding of her identity from “lesbian” to “queer and pansexual.”
Su is deeply anticipating her role as the Minnie Jane Scholar at Pendle Hill, where she hopes to continue her own writing projects with an unprecedented lack of distraction, and also to use her teaching and workshop skills to support the Pendle Hill community of writers, readers, and people who might be writers but haven’t yet had the opportunity to find out.
Friends in Residence
Jennifer Kavanagh will be Pendle Hill’s Friend in Residence beginning in fall 2024. Jennifer became a Quaker in 1995. She gave up a career in publishing to work with those on the margins: people in poverty, homeless, or in prison. Jennifer is an associate tutor at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre and now spends most of her time writing, speaking, and running retreats on the Spirit-led life. She has published twelve non-fiction books and three novels. Jennifer finds balancing an active life with a pull towards contemplation a continuing and fruitful challenge. As she writes, “Life in the world is about a series of balances: of the life within and the outside world; inner experience and outward witness, plenitude and the void.”
You can learn more about Jennifer at https://www.jenniferkavanagh.co.uk/.
Deborah Cooper, M. Ed. L.P.C., is a licensed professional counselor, a member of Germantown Monthly Meeting and a provider with the Friends Counseling Service. Deborah also teaches classes in Mindfulness Meditation. A seeker all her life, Deborah has been practicing Mindfulness meditation for the last 19 years. Having experienced the profound benefits of meditation in her own life, she now teaches others both individually and in groups in the Northwest Philadelphia area. For the last 3 years she has greatly benefited by spending some time in a Buddhist monastery in Canada.
