Thomas Raymond Kelly and A Testament of Devotion
“To read or not to read?” Ever have a book which has caught your attention a number of times over a period of years, but you have made the intentional decision not to read only to find it assigned for class? Thomas Raymond Kelly’s (1893 – 1941) A Testament of Devotion (1941) fits this category for me.
Kelly was a cradle to grave Quaker, i.e., Religious Society of Friends. Although born in America, he had a passion for international education, service, pacifism, and spirituality. Although he studied chemistry as an undergraduate, he pursued further education with a mystical bend in religion and philosophy through a number of avenues including self study and a Ph.D. at Hartford. Kelly’s memory loss during his oral defense for a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard crushed him (1937). But with the publication of Explanation and Reality in the Philosophy of Emile Meyerson (1937) . . .
No one knows exactly what happened, but a strained period in his life was over. He moved toward adequacy. A fissure in him seemed to close, cliffs caved in and filled up a chasm, and what was divided grew together within him. Science, scholarship, method remained good, but in a new setting. Â Now he could say with Isaac Pennington, ‘Reason is not sin, but a deviation from that from which reason came is a sin.
He went to to the Germantown Friends’ Meeting at Coulter Street to deliver three lectures in January 1938. He told me the lectures wrote themselves. At Germantown, people were deeply moved and said, “This is authentic.“ His writing writings and spoken messages began to be marked by a note of experimental authority.”  — Douglas V. Steere, “A Biographical Memoir.” In Thomas Raymond Kelly. A Testament of Devotion. Harper & Brothers, 1941, 118. [Read more…] about Christian Devotional Classics: A Testament of Devotion