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.
There is a great spiritual poverty in the world today, especially in the Western world. This, it could be argued, began with the decline of the main Western religion, Christianity. It came about with the questioning of the credibility of the Bible and, because it has been taken as the literal truth, people lost faith in God. This has left a vacuum, which has been filled with alternatives such as Eastern religions, New Age ways, but mainly materialism, as people search for meaning. The material success of the West has meant the rest of the world has followed suit. This materialism, and lack of spirituality, is the main cause of the world’s problems.
Not long ago I spent a week in the cellars of Quaker House in Brussels. This was to take stock of the archive of the Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA), starting when it was set up in 1979. What I found myself focusing on was the first four years, when Pat and Brian Stapleton were the representatives in post.
For more than a hundred years Yorkshire Friends have joined together over the Easter period to enjoy each other’s company, to worship, to learn and, more recently, to appreciate the spacious comfort and gardens of Cober Hill in Cloughton, Scarborough, purchased by Arnold Rowntree in 1920. This year the welcome for the Easter Settlement was extended to Friends and friends beyond Yorkshire. The theme for the 2017 Easter Settlement was ‘Towards Quaker views of education’. Over sixty people, young and not so young, gathered at Cober Hill from 14-17 April.
When I started this series, I knew it would probably be as much about me as Jesus. By the third month it was beginning to dawn on me that it was probably not by coincidence that this idea had come to me this particular year. As we struggle with the painful business of trying to understand what we, and our fellow citizens, understand by ‘Britain’, it becomes ever more apparent that in choosing how to represent Jesus, British artists have had to reflect as much on their idea of Britain as on their idea of God.
‘Children of the Stone’ is a phrase used to describe the young Palestinians of the First Intifada (1987-93) who threw stones at the Israeli invaders of their country because they could think of no other way of defending their land after the invasion of 1987. Sandy Tolan, in his book of the same name, has taken immense trouble to research the facts of the failed negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians since the 1987 invasion, and more recently the effects of the Oslo Agreement of 1993. He tells the story of a young Palestinian boy living with the results: the security ‘wall’, the checkpoints and the demolition of Palestinian houses.
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