Talk:Brethren

Is it appropriate to include the text of the "Brethren Card" here? Is it available for Fair Use? RickK 03:02 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Except in gnostic groups (which the Brethren are most emphatically not), a statement of faith is intended by virtue of its purpose to be public information, and redistribution is permitted (even, encouraged). I know that this is the view of the FGBC and CGBCI groups (and if it is wanted I can easily lay my hands on a statement of faith from either of those groups). Barring any objection from the Church of the Brethren, which seems very unlikely, I wouldn't worry about it. Additionally, I am almost sure that the included Brethren Card predates modern copyright law. --jonadab

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I think it would be good to make this a more generic article about the various Brethren denominations, and merge most of the specific information on the history & beliefs of Alexander Mack and his followers into the Schwarzenau Brethren topic. I will do that in a few days if no one objects. Please give me any opinions you might have on this. Thanks. Rlvaughn 06:38, 27 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Seeing comments neither pro nor con, I have rearranged this article as mentioned above. I am moving the "Brethren Card" info to the Schwarzenau Brethren topic. - Rlvaughn 20:46, 1 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I think this was a good idea, and in fact I think it would be good to go further. This article could usefully be a short general index article about the tradition of churches called 'Brethren', with slightly less information here about the Schwarzenau Brethren, and slightly more on the principal other churches such as Moravian Brethren, Plymouth Brethren, etc. Myopic Bookworm 23:49, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

The Brethren

The article The Brethren is about a book by John Grisham. It has one link from this article, about a US group founded in 1966. I have created The Brethren (disambiguation) to separate the Grisham book from another book and from The Brethren (cult). Perhaps an article should be created about the 1966 group as well, by someone with knowledge about the group. I'm not sure what the article should be named, though, as The Brethren is alrady taken. But if someone creates the article, please add a link to it at The Brethren (disambiguation). (Entheta 11:50, 10 May 2006 (UTC))

External link cleanup

The external link section is becoming excessive for this article. There are dupiclates of preferable internal links, blogs, forums and other items specifically discouraged by WP:EL. I think the easiest would be to remove the whole section and start fresh, evaluating additions against MOS:L and WP:EL for possible inclusion. Other thoughts? JonHarder 00:38, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Paragraph removed

The following paragraph, added here, is not sourced and could not be confirmed by me. Please restore if it turns out to be correct.

The Brethren, a Central U.S. group founded in 1966 as an iconoclastic response to the Vietnam War and to question the burgeoning feminist movement. Members are now active from coast to coast and in Canada. All members are college educated. Most marry, have children, and pursue lives which express fundamental gender differences, as researched by Simon Baron-Cohen.

Maybe this is a really convoluted, misleading and false reference to The Brethren (cult); in any event, Baron-Cohen does not seem to be involved at all. AxelBoldt 00:05, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

On the other hand, Baron-Cohen (Simon, not Sacha!) is a pretty reliable source, and founding in 1966 is not 1971; don't rule out follow-up research. But the 2-edit IP contributor, the accompanying URL (presently an ad for an alarmist book), and a careful reading of the Baron-Cohen sentence (reserached researched diffs, not group?) are discouraging.
--Jerzy•t 23:49, 3 & 01:41, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

What a mess!

I did an edit that fixed some of the fundamental affronts to WP's purpose and style, but it needs more serious work.
Much of that work is related to the clear differences among the kinds of pages in the main namespace:

1. Rdrs provide navigation where multiple names apply to the same topic;
2. Dabs provide navigation where separate topics share the same name;
3. each Article deals with a single topic, e.g.,
   1. facts that are part of a single network of cause and effect, or
   2. phenomena that are dealt with by methods more similar among them than the methods for dealing with phenomena left outside the scope of the article.
      

I'm aware of these needs:

1. The 6 entries under "Other" are apparently related to the others only by being Protestant and using the word "brethren". They should move to Brethren (disambiguation) (unless Brethren becomes the Dab).
2. The 2 entries under "Fundamental Bible Churches", until shown otherwise, are equally unrelated, and deserve the same. (If they have a common history, they at most should perhaps share a common heading in the same Dab. If they do belong together, then either
   1. "fundamental" is PoV, or
   2. it should be lk'd to Fundamentalism in which case that article may need a slight enhancement about earlier moves twd its early-20th-century heyday, or
   3. it should be lk'd to some article related to another historical focus on fundamentals.)
3. Those plans help one focus on the biggest two problems:
   1. It's at least burdensome to reach a point where one can form a reasonable opinion about whether there is a contradiction between "The following [Anabaptist and/or Pietist] Brethren bodies are not related historically to the Schwarzenau groups descended from Alexander Mack." (the article and "The [Schwarzenau] Brethren movement began as a melding of Pietist and Anabaptist ideas." (Ch of B'n)
   2. In either case, it's important to settle whether these two separately treated groups of denominations should be treated in one article (or article section), in two, or even in three (of which. My treatment of this is obnoxiously abstract -- bcz i have no grasp of the facts, just glimmers of the shape of the histories, which make it obvious the current treatment in Brethren is disastrous. (In the "three" case, two would focus on events in denominations of one group or the other, that insignificantly affected the other, and the third would bedescribe Interaction between Schwarzenau and Anabaptist/Pietist Brethren histories or /#Interaction between Schwarzenau and Anabaptist/Pietist Brethren histories). A variation on that approach, if there are multiple periods of interaction, would be a single chronology covering both, divided into periods of isolation from each other, chronologically intermingled with periods of intense interaction. Each period of interaction would be an article or section; each period of isolation would be a pair of articles or sections, one on each group's history during the period of isolation. And of course you'd end up having to tweak that, e.g. backing up: "while the XYZ was taking place, QRS had begun", where one of XYZ and QRS affected only one of the two denominations and one affected both.)
4. Once all that reaches at least a working approach, a decision will be needed about what topic should be covered by Brethren. FWIW, i'll be surprised unless the answer is "a dab": either . A table on the talk page summarizing membership estimates is probably necessary to support any other claim -- -- even tho fertility in spawning significant offshoots also enters in. Actually, now that i think about it, could it be that this whole existing article is a product of a claim that coverage of the Schwarzenau Brethren is the overwhelmingly most notable sense of "Brethren", and counterclaims that that shortchanged the others? If so, 3.1 and 3.2 above may be crucial to have clarified, even more urgently on this page than in the articles.

(BTW, while coverage should not be mathematically proportional mathematically proportional to notability, significantly more coverage requires significantly more notability, and membership of denominations is an important contributing factor to notability. So such a table on the talk page summarizing membership estimates could also make it easier at least to motivate editors to work on the most important parts of this topicjumble of topics.)
--Jerzy•t 23:49, 3 & 02:27, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Removed "See also"

A "see also" section, outside a Dab, is often a warning sign. In this case, we deserve for each lk an explanation on talk of why

1. the following lks are necessary to an understanding of each of the denominations discussed here, and
2. those lks can't be embedded (ever heard of the wiki concept?) in sentences on this page or pages about the individual denominations.

(I'm really not saying this just for the pleasure of the sarcasm, tho this pushes the limits of any obligation to be careful against deleting useful material.)
These are the removed lks:

• Christian anarchism
• Peace church
• Simple living

--Jerzy•t 23:49, 3 January 2008 (UTC)