Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, or simply Philadelphia Yearly Meeting or PYM, is the central organizing body for Quaker meetings in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, area.
PYM is one of the newest Yearly Meetings in the Religious Society of Friends. In 1827, it divided into two Meetings in the Hicksite/Orthodox schism, each Meeting claiming the title of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. In this period the two Meetings were known by the location of their respective meetinghouses (Race Street and Arch Street). In 1955, the schism was healed and the two Meetings reunited. The Yearly Meeting is a member of Friends General Conference, the main national organization of unprogrammed Quaker Meetings. The Yearly Meeting is also a member of the National Council of Churches.
Westtown School, founded before the schism, and Haverford College became the educational mainstays of the Orthodox meeting. George School and Swarthmore College were founded to provide education for Hicksite students. While the schools remain under the indirect supervision of the Yearly Meeting, both are functionally and financially independent of the Yearly Meeting, as are other Friends Schools in the area; they may be governed by members of the Society of Friends, but they are structurally independent of the Monthly and Yearly Meetings. The colleges have no formal relationship with the Meeting.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting holds annual sessions for business to which all Friends in the Philadelphia area are asked to come. These meetings, generally held in March at the Arch Street Friends Meeting House, are an opportunity for Friends to hear about the goings-on in PYM over the previous year and other Yearly Meetings that have sent news.
Famous quotes containing the words philadelphia, yearly and/or meeting:
“It used to be said that, socially speaking, Philadelphia asked who a person is, New York how much is he worth, and Boston what does he know. Nationally it has now become generally recognized that Boston Society has long cared even more than Philadelphia about the first point and has refined the asking of who a person is to the point of demanding to know who he was. Philadelphia asks about a man’s parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents.”
—Cleveland Amory (b. 1917)
“... the yearly expenses of the existing religious system ... exceed in these United States twenty millions of dollars. Twenty millions! For teaching what? Things unseen and causes unknown!... Twenty millions would more than suffice to make us wise; and alas! do they not more than suffice to make us foolish?”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivabale encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)