Not Rock Stars: Mary, Archives, and the Holiness of Boundaries

Mary Crauderueff is the Curator of Quaker Collections in Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections. She’s an archivist, a teacher, and a fierce advocate for access. She doesn’t just preserve Quaker history in the basement of the library. She helps people meet it. The beautiful parts. The damning parts. The parts we quote at each other like scripture. And the parts we try to slide past, hoping nobody notices.

Public ministers from left to right: Christy Randazzo, Windy Cooler, Mary Crauderueff, and Lori Piñeiro Sinitzky. Outside the archives at Haverford College, October, 2025.

The Friends Incubator has this habit of asking a question that looks simple until you actually sit down with it.

“Do you consider yourself a public minister?”

On this blog we've been coming at that question from different angles all year. Tom Hamm has helped us get our arms around the long story of Quaker public ministry. Kody Hersh has brought his own delight and seriousness to it in those conversations about favorite modern public ministers, tracing the messy lineage of who shaped us, challenged us, and made us brave.

And in interview after interview, a theme keeps resurfacing: public ministry isn’t just what happens at a microphone. It isn’t only the people who get labeled “gifted,” or “prophetic,” or “controversial.” It isn’t only the ones who become the main character, the rock star, the saint, the problem.

Sometimes public ministry happens at a desk. Under fluorescent lights. Inside an institution that signs your paycheck. Sometimes it happens when you’re turning page after page of the past and deciding whether you’re going to tell the truth about what you see, and how you’re going to help other people tell the truth, too.

Sometimes it happens in the underground places. The quiet places. The places where your whole self shows up, including the parts that want to hide, and the parts that need to draw a line and say: here is what I can do, and here is what I cannot do.

That’s where Mary Crauderueff lives.

And it’s down there that I met Mary again this fall, while I was serving as Friend in Residence at Haverford College. Mary led me and my host, Lori Piñeiro Sinitzky (another public minister employed by Haverford, as the Director of Quaker Affairs), into the archives to research one of my favorite long-dead Quakers. Somewhere between the manuscripts and the boxes, we made a plan to talk again about ministry, history, and what it costs to be public with truth.

And we did...

Windy: I guess the first question I have is: do you consider yourself a public minister?

Mary: [Public minister] sounds like such a funny [phrase] to someone who is paid by an institution to do a job that I love, where I get to be challenged by many different things, including the materials I’m working with, and then I get to talk about them to all kinds of people.

In some ways, I feel like a public minister in that way. I get to dig in deep with topics, and people want to come talk to me about them, so I talk to them about them. It feels important to me in the way that I want to be part of thinking about Quakerism in deep ways that a lot of white Quakers don’t like to hear, though that is starting to change a bit.

A lot of the work that I do, particularly talking about Quakers and enslavement and abolition, is grounded in Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship. I think of that book as one of the places where a turn began in the study and talk of Quakers as enslavers.

That’s one example.

Because I’m with this material all the time, particularly the Germantown Petition of 1688, people want to talk to me about it, and I say, “You might not like all the things you hear. You’re going to be challenged.” I ask, “Have you read the part where it talks about the souls of the [white] Quakers and what happens to them?” It’s not about seeing the souls of enslaved people as human, and I’m going to talk about that because it has to be heard.

Lori and Windy play in the halls of Haverford without a pass, October 2025.

When we were sitting in my office with Lori [Piñeiro Sinitzky, the Director of Quaker Affairs at Haverford], you said, “Oh my gosh.” Does that align with what you were hearing, or was there something else you were hearing in my work?

Windy: I feel like I know you are not a Quaker anymore, and you’ve made that choice for reasons I don’t know if you want to go into publicly, but I would invite you to.

You were describing how you see your role as making Quakerism accessible, in all of its truth, to Quakers and non-Quakers alike. It seems to me that you perceive yourself, and act, as a facilitator of an ongoing conversation, an ongoing clearness committee, an ongoing threshing session between our ancestors and ourselves.

That role feels like a form of ministry to me. It raises the question: what is ministry? That’s the question that just came up for me, and it seems like I should have a pat response to it, [but I don't].

Mary: You brought up my not being Quaker anymore, which is true. I don’t talk about it publicly a lot because of the role I hold. What I’ve found over time is ways to integrate myself between these things while still having a work-life boundary, as much as one can, and bringing the values I’ve grounded myself in into whatever spiritual work I’m doing alongside my job.

My biggest thing is access: access to collections. If people don’t have access to them, why should we keep them? I also think about how we interpret them. When I take a broad look at what ministry is, I think this is a ministry.

In the longest sense of my life, when I worked in the Quaker collections at Earlham as an undergrad, I fell in love with it. I went directly to grad school and said, “I want to be a Quaker archivist when I grow up.” Quakerism is my foundation. You can take the girl out of Quakerism, but you can’t take the Quakerism out of the girl. I might belong to a Mennonite church, but I spend forty hours a week with these collections. It’s still part of me.

Windy: You’ve mentioned, not by name, but I know whom you’re speaking of when you talk about Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Vanessa Julye, Donna McDaniel, and, in the archives at Earlham College, Tom Hamm. I consider all three of those people Quaker public ministers.

Vanessa Julye, giving a workshop

Tom Hamm in his office at Earlham College

Given your relationship to the past in the archives, what do you see as your relationship to the ministers who mentored or inspired you?

Mary: With many folks like Tom, admiration and gratitude. I appreciate people who make themselves vulnerable to the work. They make themselves vulnerable and show deep care.

Windy: When I think about what it means to be a professional, it means having real boundaries between you and the work. That’s necessary in some relationships. I want a professional relationship with my doctor. There are teaching positions where this is important because you can’t have power over someone and be a peer at the same time.

In our tradition, even pastored meetings have pastors who are peers in a way.

Ministry in a Quaker context requires making yourself vulnerable in a way that would be inappropriate in other professions, because we minister to each other.

Mary: Because I get paid by an institution, it’s a different kind of vulnerability. I don’t have the same kind. Haverford is not a Quaker institution, so doing Quaker work there looks different than working for a Quaker organization.

Windy: This question of vulnerability is really compelling to me right now. I was just on a call thinking about speakers for a series, and I said I want people who are not rock stars. That comes from experiences where people describe themselves as fans [of mine], and I hate it.

When someone thinks they’re a fan, they think I’m a saint, which I’m not. [And if I can't be a saint, I am a villain]. I’m just a goofy person with a call. I am here to labor.

Mary: That’s incredibly important when thinking about who you bring forward. Sometimes people think they have to be a rock star to do this work well.

About ten years ago I did a project where I interviewed Quaker heads of Quaker organizations about their spiritual and work lives. I was invited to give a lecture for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in spring 2016, and I chose people who had been clerks or committee clerks—roles that were incredibly important but not seen as rock stars. I wanted to say: I see you as a leader. This is ministry.

Windy: Sometimes you want rock stars to draw people in, but it’s extraordinarily important not to always have them.

When people who don’t know you think they know you and have a clear opinion about you, I think about how I’m obligated to behave well. I can’t lose it with someone. There are behavioral boundaries I impose on myself because I understand how I’m perceived and the harm I could do otherwise.

Mary: I moved back to Philadelphia about ten years ago and did some Quaker meeting shopping. People would talk to me about work during worship or coffee hour, and I needed a place where I could go deep without wearing my professional hat.

I appreciate when people ask, “Is it okay if I ask you a work question right now?” That lets me feel safe enough to say no and offer my email instead.

Windy: I’ve done that to people [mixed work and personal relationship]. I’m ashamed to say it. I try so hard, but I forget sometimes.

Mary: Sometimes you don’t have the information. That happens.

Windy: I need to [have better boundaries]. I have one email for everything. The boundary I’ve created is: don’t call me unless you’re my husband, my children, or we have a date.

Mary: That’s real. Those boundaries are about safety and peace. When you’re public and vulnerable, parasocial relationships develop. We talk about that with Taylor Swift, but it happens with community rock stars too.

Parody of Taylor Swift's 2025 The Life of a Showgirl , by public minister, Kathleen Wooten.

Windy: People project onto them. When I give a presentation someone doesn’t like, they feel deeply betrayed.

Mary: Going back to Taylor Swift: all billionaires are bad. I became a Swiftie later, and I still ask, “Why did she do that?” All our favorites are problematic.

People assume I’ll never criticize her because I love her music. I can hold both things, just like [I understand that] Quakers were both enslavers and abolitionists.

When something a public minister says troubles me, maybe it’s not about them. Maybe it’s about me, and I need to deal with it.

Windy: I’ve talked with other public ministers about this. People think I’m just nice. There’s nothing nice about me. I try to be responsible, aware of my social power, and accountable, not vulnerable to projections.

Mary: There are times when I could say things very differently and feel good in the moment. Archives used to emphasize neutrality. Now I think it’s about taking a beat, stepping back, and responding thoughtfully.

That helps me re-ground in my understanding of who Jesus was. Jesus was fully himself. He got angry. He also withdrew when overwhelmed.

My grandmother, who is ninety-eight, has lived with vulnerability, care, and love. That’s how I want to behave.

Sometimes vulnerability means not saying anything right away.

Mary Crauderueff is the Curator of Quaker Collections in the Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections. She is an alum of Earlham College ('07) and the University of Maryland, College Park ('09), where she earned her Masters in Library Science, with a specialization in Archives, Records, and Information Management. Since 2009, she has worked for a variety of archives and organizations in the Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Boston areas. She returned to the Philadelphia area in June 2015 to begin this position. She has served on the board of the Scattergood Foundation (2016-2024) and Pendle Hill (2009-2014), and is a past president of the Friends Historical Association (2019-2021, board member 2010-2022). In 2020, Mary was the first Visiting Quaker Archivist for the Africa Quaker Archives in Kaimosi, Kenya. She was awarded a Clarence and Lilly Pickett Endowment for Quaker Leadership grant for an oral history project entitled Quaker Works: Journeys of Quakers Leading Friends Organizations in 2015.

She assists researchers, fosters relationships with donors, and arranges collections to ensure preservation and accessibility. Mary strives to build community and teach skills to empower all researchers in their work. One of her favorite parts of her job is engaging classes with the amazing collections Haverford holds to create more generations of researchers!