Synopsis
Three papers derived from the author’s experiences suggest a paradoxical discipline of liberating one’s life by limiting one’s material possessions and processes, thus realizing one’s responsibilities and the oneness of humanity.
About the Author(s)
Mildred Binns Young was born in 1901 in Wilmington, Ohio. She and her husband Wilmer J. Young led the first work camp organized by the American Friends Service Committee. They went on to establish the Delta Cooperative Farm in Rockdale, Mississippi. They moved to South Carolina where they continued practicing Quakerism with a social justice orientation in the rural south. This ministry lasted for nineteen years. From 1955 to 1966, they lived at Pendle Hill. In 1966 they moved to the Guild House, built by the Quaker Settlement called the Friends Neighborhood Guild. Mildred died in 1995, and members of Arch Street Monthly Meeting fondly remember her ministry. They also remember her steadfast intellectual curiosity, summed up by Doris Hastings Darnell in the following paragraphs from her memorial minute:
“Who else but Mildred would have taught herself German so she could read Thomas Mann in the original and then shifted to Italian so she could read Dante in the original? Who else do we know who read both The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books from cover to cover faithfully never skipping an article, and then asked the university libraries available to her to track down the books that tempted that searching, stimulating mind?”
Pendle Hill Pamphlet #6
