(an Earthquake thrust them open!!)

Acts 16:25-26

From the Prison House: Jacob Hoopes 

Mystical Uprising: New Quaker Witness Against Violence

375+ years of Friends’ imprisonment leads to a young activist’s incarceration this week

“I was made to sing in the Lord’s power.”
—George Fox, beaten by a Carlisle jailer, 1653

Between Rock and Spirit: Lord make me a Stone to Lean On

July 30, 2026 

On June 23, 2025 Jacob Hoopes—a 25-year-old Quaker activist—was driven this week by his parents to a federal jail in Oregon to begin a 30-month prison sentence. He has pled guilty to aggravated assault on an ICE officer during a confrontation on June 14th. The weapon was a rock. It was an accident in a fit ot outrage. The injury – a gash above an agent’s eye. A sentence harsh. Act and consequence marking him as a felon for life.

This week, as Jacob entered the prison system, he entered a babbling brook; a stream of Quaker experiences that stretches back for more than 375 years. Friends have been imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and killed for following conscience against state power since our movement’s birth in the 1650s. What connects Jacob to this history is not simply incarceration—it is the difficult uprising and spiritual wrestling that brings a person of peace to the barricades of the state violence that holds them afterward.

Quaker relationship to imprisonment has always been paradoxical. Friends transformed dungeons into meetinghouses, cells into sanctuaries, torture into ecstactic prayer. They sang. This thread follows; how Spirit, the arts, meditation, and prayer have sustained Friends through state violence across centuries, and what this tradition asks of us now.

“My Dungeon Became a Palace”

Thomas Budd and the Ladder Above the Vermin

Before Dewsbury, before the Boston Martyrs—indeed, before Quakerism had a name—there was my great-grandfather, Rev. Thomas Budd.

He was Oxford educated. He rose to the office of Very Right Reverend in the Church of England. He was not born a dissenter; he was formed by the establishment, groomed for its highest honors. Then he encountered Quakerism. Something in our testimony—perhaps refusal to perform piety, or how insistence is experienced; and, that Christ speaks directly to the conscience (and perhaps a soul?) without mediation of any authority – priest or bishop. Quaker testimony convinced him. The Divine interceded. He could no longer swear an oath.

This was no small matter in seventeenth-century England. Oath was the legal mechanism by which the state secured loyalty, compelled testimony, and enforced religious conformity. To refuse it was to place oneself apart. Quakerism existed outside the protection of law. It was to invite the charge of sedition, blasphemy, or both. It had serious consequences. These consequences compel us through to today.

Thomas Budd was charged with blasphemy. He was imprisoned in Ilchester Gaol. He would only be released if he’d swear on a Bible.

For almost nine years, he refused to recant. The conditions were medieval. The floor crawled with vermin—rats and filth so thick that prisoners sought whatever elevation they could find. Thomas, aging and weakened, could no longer climb the ladder above the violence of the floor. He died there, in the stench and the damp, having refused to the end what his conscience could not give: an oath to a power that claimed authority over the soul.

I think of him whenever I hear the word “resilience.” The judge who sentenced Jacob Hoopes told him he was resilient and would be okay. This is what power always says to those it crushes: You are strong enough to survive what we are doing to you. Thomas Budd did not survive. His resilience was not the kind that impresses judges. It was the kind that dies in a cell, unknown to history except through the fragile thread of family memory and the great cloud of witnesses who refuse to let the state have the final word.

What song did Thomas Budd sing? We have no record. Perhaps he sang the psalms he had known since Oxford, stripped now of their formality, made raw and immediate by suffering. Perhaps he sang extemporaneous songs of the Spirit, as Fox would later do at Carlisle. Perhaps he simply waited in the silence that Friends have always known to be a form of music—the still, small voice that speaks when all human comfort has fled.

As Jacob begins serving time our state seeks to take away our prayer can be that Jacob teaches other prisoners the “Keys to the Prisons Gates.” Like early f/Friends and many of our experiences during COVID 19 lock downs – the greatest gifts of creation can be when we are given a prison to ‘do time’… That he can do his time in community and not let time do him. Because that is the condition for most of the outward society in which we struggle to not  let time do me!’ We are practiced and learning that creation can take a breath and blow a meditative life into us that reaches down into our souls. ‘During Covid time I learned to make time again.’ one friends writes. Taking Time, Making time. Deepening relations. Human being over human doing. This prayer is for Jacob Hoopes. Friends have found in prisons, in service (AVP and earlier) a Key to our Beloved Creation.