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.
Sixty murderers told me they didn’t want to kill – and then didn’t. There are several explanations for this, but only one is true. The obvious one is that they fooled me, they pretended to be ‘good’, but weren’t. This is the explanation prison ministers prefer, and use it to run our prisons. Another is that they were so frightened of ‘punishment’ that they decided to behave ‘properly’. Conventional wisdom supposes that murderers calculate the balance between mayhem and merit with nice precision, and then chose mayhem. By contrast Quakerism advises us to ‘utterly deny’ all outward force and coercion – and those murderers taught me why.
In a New Statesman article last month about her life as a peace campaigner, Sheila Hancock wrote: ‘As a Quaker, I aspire to be a pacifist.’ She considered whether, with a gun in her pocket, she would refrain from using it to save someone from being murdered. Would she, as she hoped, find the courage to reason with the attacker? I share her honest doubts for, as a Friend, I aspire to be a Quaker.
The theme of Ireland Yearly Meeting (IYM) 2017, which was held at The High School, Rathgar in Dublin between 20-23 April, was a quotation from Mohandas Gandhi: ‘Live simply, so that others may simply live’.
All species and the Earth itself have interdependent roles within Creation. Humankind is not the species to whom all others are subservient, but one among many. All parts, all issues, are inextricably intertwined. Indeed, the web of creation could be described as of three-ply thread: wherever we touch it we affect justice and peace and the health of all everywhere. So all our testimonies, all our Quaker work, all our Quaker lives are part of one process, of striving towards a flourishing, just and peaceful Creation – the Kingdom of God.
Audrey Urry, 1994
Quaker faith & practice 25.04
The USA entered the first world war on 6 April 1917 when Congress, in response to a proposal by president Woodrow Wilson, voted to declare war on Germany. He had asked Congress to support a ‘war to end all wars’ that ‘would make the world safe for democracy’. It was a decision that would have profound implications on the course of the conflict.
Saturday: full of suspense and expectation,
Meeting new people, filled with fear and elation.
Sunday: getting to grips with the land,
And realising it’s ok when life doesn’t go as planned.
Monday: learning how to nurture and sew,
Then working in the kitchen to eat what we grow.
Tuesday: chopping wood and being outdoors,
Then trusting ourselves into nature’s great paws.
Wednesday: having pizza and an explore,
Both left us all wishing for more.
Finally Thursday and time to leave,
It’s funny, the friendships, in just a week, we’ve achieved.
It will be nice to get ourselves back home
Although I know I’ll miss the place and people so.
Miranda (Miri) Green
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