In 1738, a four-foot-tall Quaker named Benjamin Lay walked into the most powerful Quaker meeting in Pennsylvania, drew a sword, and drove it through a hollowed book filled with red juice that splattered across the slaveholders in the front rows. He was thrown into the street. He came back. He had been doing this for years, and would keep doing it for twenty more --- expelled from four meetings, living alone in a cave outside Abington, Pennsylvania, spinning his own cloth and growing his own food and refusing to let comfortable, pious, genuinely well-meaning people look away from what their comfort was built on. This is his story. It is also a question he asks across three centuries, quietly, to anyone willing to hear it.

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