The Friend

Yearly Meeting Gathering 2017: The main sessions

During the Yearly Meeting at the University of Warwick between 29 July and 5 August Friends dealt with an enormous number of items of routine business, including various nominations, and the business sessions were ably dealt with by the clerking team of Deborah Rowlands, clerk, and assistant clerks Clare Scott Booth and Siobhan Haire.

Our goal

At the recent Yearly Meeting Gathering participants were given a daily journal for their notes. At the top of each page were a few questions on the particular theme of each day. As often happens, some spoke to me more than others, and some spoke to me because of the alternative questions they provoked.

The Salter Lecture: Conscience in the political life

There are positive things we can look forward to, Molly Scott Cato, Quaker and Green MEP, assured her audience at the 2017 Salter Lecture, ‘Brexit, Chilcot and the Role of Conscience in the Political Life’, which was delivered on Wednesday evening at Yearly Meeting, but ‘something is rotten in the public realm’. She argued that the UK now faces ‘a more serious crisis than any my generation can remember’. At a time when leaders of stature were needed it can seem that ‘small souls with little wisdom’ are governing us. ‘Politicians are still human beings,’ she said, ‘so, how can we balance reason and intuition; the need to represent people with conscience?’

The George Gorman Lecture: Movement building from stillness

If the Spirit is in every person then the Quaker community is, by definition, open to all.

In the George Gorman Lecture, held on Tuesday 1 August, Tim Gee explored themes such as power, diversity, and the spiritual root of action.