Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity

By Catherine Whitmire and Parker J. Palmer

Must reading for anyone feeling too busy or too stressed and seeking to simplify their life—to listen to the longings of their heart.

Most of us living in this complex and time-pressured era have moments when we wish we were living simpler, more meaningful lives. Sometimes these wishes are fleeting desires, but for many today the search for a life of greater simplicity and meaning has developed into a deep longing. There are many routes to simplicity. This book focuses on and provides direction to the gimmick-free spiritual path followed by Quakers. For over three centuries Quakers have been living out of a spiritual center in a way of life they call "plain living." Their accumulated experiences and distilled wisdom have much to offer anyone seeking greater simplicity today. Plain Living is not about sacrifice. It's about choosing the life you really want, a form of inward simplicity that leads us to listen for the "still, small voice"of God. This book goes beyond the merely trendy to make the by now well-worn Quaker path to plain living accessible to everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ave Maria Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781933495415

Catherine Whitmire

Quaker author Cathy Whitmire has served for decades in many leadership roles in the Quaker community, including supervising community empowerment projects in New England for the American Friends Service Committee. She is an Alternatives to Violence trainer, and has nonviolent communication and mediation training. Whitmire received a master of divinity degree in 1987 from Harvard Divinity School. She has served as a Protestant chaplain and pastoral counselor on a psychiatric unit of an inner-city hospital in Boston. She attended the Shalem Institute’s program in spiritual direction in 1997 and also writes, provides spiritual direction, and leads peace and nonviolence workshops and retreats. The mother of a grown son and two stepsons, Whitmire lives with her husband, Tom Ewell, in a home overlooking Puget Sound in Washington.

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Reviews for Plain Living

[turtlesleap · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This one is sort of a combination of self-help and spiritual advice. Mostly, a collection of wise quotations and aphorisms which are meant to give the reader something to think about. This type of book, generically, tends to give a worth piece of advice and then repeat it, expand on it, enlarge it, explain it to the point of tedium. As far as I have experienced, all self-help books do this, which is why I rarely read them. This book, beautifully printed, with great cover design, is still no exception.