Rufus Jones

Jones was born into an old Quaker family in South China, Maine. In 1885 graduated from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and stayed on to earn his M.A there in 1886. From 1893 to 1912 he was the editor of the Friends' Review (later called The American Friend). In 1901 Jones received another M. A. from Harvard.
He also began teaching philosophy and psychology at Haverford in 1893 and continued to do so until retiring in 1934. From 1898 to 1936 he served on the board of trustees of Bryn Mawr College.

In 1917 he helped found the American Friends Service Committee. In 1927 Jones took a trip to Asia at the invitation of the YMCA. His main purpose was to address missionaries in China, but he made stops in Japan, India, and the Holy Land as well. While in India Jones visited Mahatma Gandhi and visited the birthplace of the Buddha. This trip helped Jones formulate a new approach to missions--that of giving humanitarian aid to people while respecting other religions and not aggressively converting people to one's own religion. In 1938 he went with George Walton and D. Robert Yarnall on a mission to Germany to try to find a peaceful way of dealing with the Nazis.

Jones worked hard at soothing some of the hurt from the 19th Century split among Friends and had some success. Jones wrote extensively on the topic of mysticism, which is one of the chief aspects of the Quaker faith.

He distinguished between negating or negative mysticism (making contact with an impersonal force) and affirming or affirmative mysticism (making contact with a personal being). He upheld that God is a personal being with whom human beings could interact. He wrote in The Trail of Life in the Middle Years, "The essential characteristic of [mysticism] is the attainment of a personal conviction by an individual that the human spirit and the divine Spirit have met, have found each other, and are in mutual and reciprocal correspondence as spirit with Spirit." At the same time that he distinguished between negative and affirmative mysticism, he asserted that all negative mystics occasionally take the affirmative approach and that all affirmative mystics tread the negative path from time to time.

Jones died in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

Books and Articles by Rufus M. Jones

• Practical Christianity, 1899.
• The Abundant Life, 1908.
• The Inner Life, 1916.
• Spiritual Energies in Daily Life, 1922.
• The Faith and Practice of the Quakers, 1927.
• Pathways to the Reality of God, 1931."Mystical Experience" in The Atlantic Monthly, May 1942.

• Friend of Life--A Biography of Rufus M. Jones by Elizabeth Gray Vining."Rufus Jones and Mysticism for the Masses" by Matthew S. Hedstrom in Cross Currents, Summer 2004.