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.
What is the core of Quakerism? What does it mean to be a Quaker? It is often said that you will get as many different answers to these questions as the number of Quakers you ask. Many Friends today worry that Quakerism is in danger of becoming no more than a liberal movement or pressure group. We can certainly be seen to tick many liberal boxes with our concerns: justice, freedom, feminism, equality, peace, poverty, social and ecological justice, and so on.
Marina Lewycka revealed her talent for comic writing in 2005 when her debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Two years later she was shortlisted for this award again, along with the Orwell Prize for political writing, for her thought-provoking Two Caravans. She followed these books with We are All Made of Glue and Various Pets Alive and Dead, each carving out humour from life in modern Britain.
The Fair Funerals campaign, which is run by Quaker Social Action, held a funeral procession in Parliament Square on 17 October to deliver a letter to chancellor Philip Hammond, calling on the government to increase the fund to cover basic funeral costs annually in line with inflation and stop families on a low income getting into debt when burying their loved ones.
The decision by over 100 teachers to support the campaign to sell white poppies in schools, made at the recent National Union of Teachers conference, has prompted a lively public discussion on the subject of war, peace and remembrance.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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