Selected Works

Quaker Quests: A 2nd Report from Philadelphia (2024)

Read the testimonies of some 40 Quakers about ways they seek to live into their Quaker faith.

  • Finding Quakerism
  • Preparing for Worship
  • Individual Spiritual Practices
  • Advocacy
  • Pastoral Care
  • Traveling in the Ministry

The Peace Corps: Early Days (2023)

One of the most exciting developments of the 1960s was the founding of the Peace Corps: so ambitious, so popular, and so emblematic of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. Many thousands of Americans responded volunteering to serve in the underdeveloped countries of the world, and Greg Barnes was among them—part of a group forever to be known as Sierra Leone One. Ultimately he served as both volunteer and staffer from 1961 to 1966.

Here are his memoirs of his work as volunteer in Sierra Leone and his staff work in both Nigeria and Washington. Because of his varied and intense service, moving from a remote village in Sierra Leone to the power corridors of Peace Corps headquarters where R. Sargent Shriver carried out JFK’s directions, his book provides insights of use to current and future historians of the agency.

Quaker Service: A Report from Philadelphia (2022)

In this volume, 38 Philadelphia Quakers speak of their efforts toward the betterment of the world. Some work in the arts, others in caring professions; a few focus on civic activism, environmentalism, or international relations; all are volunteers, whether in meeting service or personal outreach to a community. What they write of is, in Quaker parlance, their ministries.

Monticello at Mid-Century: A Midwestern Boyhood (2021)

Life was different back then. People really “dialed” telephone numbers on rotary dials; a few farmers still plowed their fields with horses; and teenagers mastered car-driving with gear shifts and the delicate art of “letting in the clutch.” In this portrait of the Lincoln country of Illinois c. 1950, Gregory Barnes draws on his own experiences to help readers learn about forgotten aspects of rural American life—some of them best forgotten but also humorous and all of them told with warmth. Still, on a timeless note, the book ends with a special story of recognizable Thanksgiving celebrations among his father’s family, titled “A Prairie Thanksgiving.”

Friends in the City: Aging in Places (2020)

Just at the turn of the 21st century, a small group of Quaker women in Philadelphia promoted a modest proposal: living together into their old age. They, their husbands, and their allies persisted until they realized not only their dream of a communal home but something well beyond: a vehicle of social interaction for hundreds of central Philadelphia residents. In the latest of his Quaker-themed books about Philadelphia, Greg Barnes traces the story of Friends in the City, a new community without walls that has provided older city dwellers with new friends as well as stimulating urban adventures, and brought a small number of them into an experimental retirement community. This pictorial history both celebrates senior creativity and offers a model for other communities.

Living into the Faith: A Quaker Diary 2007-2015 (2019)

As a reflection of one man’s spiritual journey, this diary reveals the broad range of activities in modern unprogrammed Quakerism and the Quaker principles, or “testimonies,” that animate them. Barnes finds inspiration as well as occasional humor in his volunteering for various forms of Quaker service. The setting is Philadelphia and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the heart of American Quakerism as transplanted from England by William Penn.

The Beauty Queen of Bonthe and other Stories of West Africa (2018)

The seven stories of this collection are all set during the dynamic age of transition from colonial rule to independence among West African countries. They show the complex lives of a diverse population: a villager fallen on hard times who laments the means by which he feeds his family; a foreign teacher puzzled by the unfamiliar goings-on in a Sierra Leonean village; an expatriate couple confronting a headless staircase over the ocean and their own existential crises; an expatriate aid worker caught in moral dilemma; a leper who survives another day of beggary; a British colonial officer and a traditional Nigerian chief both of whom fear a diminished status as they confront a dramatic change in their home town; and of course the beautiful young Sierra Leonean who alarms her community by a drastic action that threatens her life.

Kirkus Review: "Africans and Westerners wrestle with sickness, culture clash, and the turmoil of decolonization in these richly imagined stories." See the full review at Kirkus

Jane Among Friends

Who knew that the wife of a famous he-man was a Quaker?  Or that there was such a book as a Quaker comedy?  Jane, Lady Greystoke makes it so through a series of letters to her childhood friend Hazel, Lady Tennington.  She has been a traditional wife until her husband’s rather anti-climactic death but now finds her entrepreneurial soul as manager of the family cattle ranch in East Africa, usurping the manly aspirations of her bumbling son Jack.  Jane’s closest companion is in fact Chulk, a 400-lb. gorilla once left for dead with a head wound that, instead of killing him, stimulated an insatiable intellectual curiosity; the ever-questioning Chulk has chosen to live with Jane, Jack, and Jack’s charming if fickle wife Meriem rather than his own unintellectual kind.  As the family plots to save their cattle from an audacious leopard (another surprising character), much fun is created, though serious questions arise (often propounded by Chulk) about human behavior, animal rights, life and death, God and heaven, and the meaning of love.

Philadelphia’s Arch Street Meeting House: A Biography

Before Philadelphia Friends built the world’s largest Quaker meeting house, the property on which it stands had served as a burial ground since the days of William Penn.   Hence, this biography—a story of well over 300 years that includes important personae:  Penn; Owen Biddle, Jr. (the 1804 builder of the meeting house); Anne Parrish, founder of the first female charitable society in the U.S.; Anthony Benezet, who established (with brother-in-law Benjamin Franklin)  Philadelphia’s anti-slavery society; and those feminists of increasing fame:  Lucretia Mott and the Grimké sisters (Sarah and Angelina), who headed early abolition activities.  The book also includes a chapter recreating life in Philadelphia in 1825.

A Centennial History of the American Friends Service Committee.

Established in 1917 to provide pacifist young males alternative service to fighting in World War I, the American Friends Service Committee has reconfigured itself many times over the years to meet differing human needs as they arose:  first, feeding programs for the displaced of both sides in war zones and for the destitute in Russia (1918-21) and Appalachian coal-mining areas (the 1930’s), then educational, medical, and agricultural programs in the far corners of  the world (even North Korea); thus, it became a model for the U.S. Peace Corps.  Powerful allies nurtured the AFSC’s work in its early years:  Herbert Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt (referred to in the book as the AFSC’s “guardian angel”), and finally Martin Luther King, whom the AFSC joined in civil rights work; it was the AFSC that arranged publication of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”  In later years the organization has worked in diverse areas (e.g., prison reform) to act on the Quaker belief in that of God in each person. 

A Biography of Lillian and George Willoughby, 20th-century Peace Activists.

HE sailed the Pacific to block the testing of nuclear bombs; SHE picketed at Levittown to prevent the new Pennsylvania suburb from excluding African-Americans; THEY traveled to India and elsewhere to link up with Gandhians in an endless quest to bring peace to the world. The biography, published by Edwin Mellen Press, is based largely on interviews between Barnes and the Willoughbys conducted in the early 21 st century.