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.
One of the commonest big questions that people ask is: ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I think they’re asking the wrong question. This question presupposes that in the beginning there was a meaning and that life came about in order to fulfil that meaning. I think the question needs to be turned on its head, because I believe that life came first and it’s down to us to find meaning in it.
The recent news item in the Friend (23 June) on the Bradford Peace Museum’s programme for schools put me in mind of a wonderfully nourishing experience some of us had recently, engaging with Year Six children from our local primary school. The head teacher, who is an attender at our Meeting, asked if she could bring the children up to the Meeting house for ‘Circle Time’, in the context of a programme in which she was introducing them to different denominations.
On 7 July countries meeting at a United Nations conference in New York adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, announced by the UN as ‘the first multilateral legally-binding instrument for nuclear disarmament to have been negotiated in twenty years’.
The Friend Publications Limited, publisher of the Friend and Friends Quarterly, is a small independent charity. We have a board of Quaker trustees and a small number of paid staff. We are independent of Britain Yearly Meeting, both editorially and in governance.
…faced with the decision, whether or not to approve the epistle. We had laboured for several hours the day before, and it looked as though preferences for wording and other concerns would make it impossible to approve the final draft.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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