Synopsis
“The source of religion is within us as a native endowment.” So what are the impediments to worship? Why can a communal practice be fruitful? How/when might silence/solitude come into play?”
Jean Toomer was a poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. Toomer struggled to identify as “an American” and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends. In this brief pamphlet, his plea on behalf of the Quakers reminds us “it is one thing to still our habitual thoughts and motions, but quite another to cause the spiritual self to arise.”
