the opposite of an onion

I. True decentered systems have subtle self-generalizing properties. Decentered epistemics chafe against their own substantial skin, falter at underwriting the very substantial ontology that would underwrite it. Take Quakerism. Like Methodists and Baptists, Quakers (aka the Friends) are historically “second-layer” Christian reformers that seek to radicalize the Protestant rupture of a previous century. Yet George Fox’s metadoctrine of the Inner Light and the corresponding practice of Unprogrammed Worship (blank, creedless, preacherless, songless) are almost unintelligible to Christianity. Unprogrammed Worship is expectant silence, Grelet’s l”attente, waiting (but literally/epistemologically “stretching out for”) the Inner Light to commandeer just anyone present. Correspondingly, the core of Quakerism is in testimonies, binding without ground: God in the enemy, the disregard of hat honors, the refusal of oaths, plain speech, plain dress. Quakerism has long been in my radar out of that…