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.
It may be that everyday evil is just an absence of the good, as a Friend recently wrote in the Friend. However, when we are faced with industrialised genocide or the carpet-bombing of civilian populations my intuition screams out that there is more to it than that. I am not enough of a theologian to be able to say what God may or may not want. I am, rather, a practical scientist who asks if Darwinian evolution may be able to help us in this matter. It is quite an achievement that Augustine of Hippo with his privatio boni managed to largely foreclose the study of evil for a thousand years.
On a recent visit to Israel to find out more about the lives of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers there, I chanced upon a photography exhibition at the Israel Museum featuring the work of the Israeli photographer Ron Amir. It was entitled ‘Doing Time in Holot’. Holot is the detention facility in the Negev Desert where African asylum seekers are routinely detained. It is not a prison, because those held within it are free to leave during the hours of 6am to 10pm – free to explore the surrounding desert. The photographs were very powerful, as was the reaction of the Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers whom I meet in Doncaster, who find the scenes so familiar.
We know that Jesus identified himself with the suffering and the sinful, the poor and the oppressed. We know that he went out of his way to befriend social outcasts. We know that he warned us against the deceitfulness of riches, that wealth and great possessions so easily come between us and God, and divide us from our neighbours. The worship of middle-class comfort is surely a side-chapel in the temple of Mammon. It attracts large congregations, and Friends have been known to frequent it… In brief, he makes us all ashamed that we are not all out in caring for our fellow-men.
H G Wood, 1958
Quaker faith & practice 23.03
In 2015 British Quakers committed themselves to give priority to working with others to identify and address the root causes of inequalities in our society. With increasing powers devolved to Holyrood, are some Quakers right in believing Scotland can show the rest of the United Kingdom the way?
A strong Quaker presence is anticipated next Tuesday at noon in Tavistock Square, London, to mark International Conscientious Objectors Day.
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