Friends in Residence

Each year Pendle Hill hosts Friends in Residence who are present throughout the term and provide support and guidance founded on their long experience in the Religious Society of Friends. The company of these seasoned Friends adds a special dimension to the community's understanding of what it means to be a Quaker.

Fall 2010

A member of Madison Monthly Meeting (WI) currently sojourning in the Philadelphia area, La Verne Shelton writes essays and inspirational poems. She has presented workshops that express a concern for God-centered communities that welcome diversity and co-create healthy processes for transforming conflict. She is a philosopher and an active musician. La Verne was the Carroll Scholar during the 2009-2010 Resident Program year at Pendle Hill. She will serve as Friend in Residence for the summer and fall of 2010 and the winter and spring of 2011.

John and Margaret Crompton hail from the large, agricultural county of Lincolnshire, famous for long views, wide skies, and the poet Tennyson. They are honored to be nominated to spend the autumn term 2010 at Pendle Hill and would value the opportunity to study and learn, and to contribute to the life of the community.

John was born on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, and has been a teacher at schools, colleges, universities, and adult education: English Literature, Language, Education, and Drama. He has published numerous articles and three books, was a founding member of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK), and at 52 completed a PhD on the novels of Elizabeth Taylor (1912 – 1975). From boyhood, he has been a keen birdwatcher.

Margaret's life has been devoted to children and literature. She trained as a social worker. After two years as assistant warden in a residential settlement in the East End of London, she worked in Leeds Children’s Department, then as a lecturer in Social Work (Bradford and Newcastle Universities). Since 1978 she has researched, lectured, and written/edited books and articles about communicating with children, developing ideas about spiritual well-being in the context of care, welfare, and health service. She enjoys playing the piano, especially duets, and accompanying singers/other instrumentalists, and also enjoys writing fiction and poetry, and sketching.

Winter 2011

A long time member of Santa Cruz Monthly Meeting (California), Betty Devalcourt’s spiritual life is enriched by the mystical experience of her Roman Catholic upbringing and Zen Buddhist practice. For five years she was program coordinator and support for workshop attendees at Ben Lomond Quaker Center (California). In addition to being clerk of her monthly meeting’s Ministry and Oversight Committee for several years, she has worked as an MSW social worker with elders, families, and patients dealing with the diagnosis of HIV+/AIDS. She has traveled widely for humanitarian purposes, including to Bangladesh, Cuba, and Nigeria.

John deValcourt is a member of Santa Cruz Monthly Meeting, and has been its treasurer and clerk. He taught mathematics at Cabrillo College for 20 years until his retirement in 2004. In the earlier half of his adult life, he was a teaching monk in the Roman Catholic order of the Christian Brothers.

Spring 2011

Mary Barnes is a member of Maury Creek Friends Meeting in Lexington, Virginia, part of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. A Quaker since 1975, she helped start her monthly meeting in Lexington in the 1980s. She was a student at Pendle Hill with her family in the late 1970s and returned with her husband, who was Development director, from 1997 to 2001. Today, in addition to other work, she is a professional weaver and sells her wares at a number of different venues. She lives in a very rural area in the Alleghany mountains of Virginia where she gardens, cans, and lives a simple life.

Richard Barnes, a convinced Friend of 35 years, was a founding member and former clerk of Maury River Friends Meeting and Virginia Half-Years Meeting. His family, including their two children, were students at Pendle Hill for a year in 1978. He and his wife, Mary served as co-clerks of the FGC Gathering of over 2200 Friends in 1997. He served as clerk of the Quaker Universalist Fellowship for ten years and has been a workshop leader at several FGC Gatherings and at three different yearly meetings. After a career in a school counseling and administration, he served as director of Development at Pendle Hill. Now retired, he has a large organic garden, cuts his own firewood, and lives in one of the least populated counties east of the Mississippi River. His interests include mysticism, spiritual discernment practices, and the parallels between the early Quakers and what Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan today call “emerging Christianity.”