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.
When intolerance, hate crime and anti-Semitism raised its head in 2016, Disley Quakers felt led to figure out what they could do in the community to stand against it. We wanted to build bridges with people we didn’t know. We had contacts with some of the churches and the Women’s Institute, so out of a very small beginning grew a group called Disley Community Together. This led to planning a ‘taster’ day, where people could come together to do something positive for others.
We know that many people have been influenced by their connections with Woodbrooke over the years, and we are deeply grateful that Woodbrooke is held in such high regard. We want to begin by reassuring Friends that Quakerism runs through our organisation as strongly as it has ever done and particularly that Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre continues to be our formal name.
I don’t want to be good. It’s the trying I find difficult. Whenever I have tried to be good in the past it has never ended well. What’s worse, the more I try, the more I find myself tempted to give up and go back to not being good. The truth is I was never very good at being good.
Historically, Quaker Meetings were formed and Meeting houses built or established by groups of Friends for worship together and mutual support. They were obviously located close to where the Friends lived and very likely where they also worked.
After every terrorist attack, the media are flooded with experts trying to rationalise events. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ ‘How can we understand them?’ ‘How were they radicalised?’ ‘Is it connected with Islam?’ ‘What can we do to prevent more attacks?’
Geza Vermes, who died aged eighty-eight in 2013, was probably the greatest Jesus scholar of his time. The last book published in his lifetime, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicea, AD 30-325, summarises his view of the historical Jesus the Jew, preaching to Jews, not gentiles as scholars such as E P Sanders would claim.
Become a subscriber to enjoy unlimited access to our articles, dating back to 2009! Online subscribers get the Friend to their inbox each week, can comment on articles, and dive into our 1914-18 digital archive too!
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.
News | Views | Reviews
Written by and for Friends on the bench
Subscribe