The Friend is a weekly magazine in which Friends speak to each other and to the wider world, offering their insight, ideas, news, nurture and inspiration.
Nurturing Quaker community, each issue offers a space for Friends to share their concerns, and to support each other in faith and witness.
The Friend: enriching, inspiring and connecting the Quaker community since 1843.
I am lying on my back in the garden, looking up through a froth of plum blossom to the piercing blue sky above. A field mouse perches confidently on a twig beside the bird feeder, takes his fill of peanuts, and quickly scampers down the tree and into the undergrowth. The undersides of four gulls gleam white as they fly above me; and are gone. A series of bubbles wafts over the fence from the children next door, and happy shrieking follows. My feet and legs are warm in the sunshine; a breeze caresses my face. After many months of darkness, rain and cold this sudden arrival of full-blown spring feels to me like heaven.
Robert Barclay’s An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (1676) is a central text in the history of Quakerism, as Mark Frankel highlighted in a recent ‘Thought for the Week’ (3 March). Here I want to examine the light that Barclay’s text can shed on Donald Trump’s evangelical power base.
How do we affirm the value of our young children and parents in Local Meetings? The children and young People’s advocates at Finchley Meeting booked a Quaker Life workshop in order to address this question. It was held at Finchley Meeting House on 11 March and proved extremely productive. The workshop raised many issues that will be of relevance and interest to Friends, and food for thought at Yearly Meeting Gathering, where very young Friends will be present.
My Friend prefers First Class on the train, especially after a group of youths in the vestibule began shouting abuse. ‘It’s a Tranny!’ And: ‘It’s a Man!’ They kept shouting until they got off the train. That might be described as societal transphobia, where boisterous young men think that men in dresses are ridiculous, and should be ridiculed. But some people have a similar and disproportionate response to transsexual or transgender people akin to arachnophobes’ reaction to spiders.
There is no denying the fact that it is difficult to find ‘that of God’ in some prison inmates. We have to hope that with help they can change for the better. Jürgen Moltmann, in his book Theology of Hope, reminds us how hope strengthens and increases our faith if it is anchored in God. If we go along with this idea then we are more likely to treat people with positive regard and respect rather than dwell on their past and their mistakes. We are allowing change to happen and keeping possibilities open, even though we know that their crimes may be tabloid headline-worthy.
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Whether you are new to Quakerism or have been going to Meeting for years, you’ll find something here to inspire, inform and challenge you.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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