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.
The badge ‘I’m a Quaker – ask me why’ encourages and challenges us all to articulate our own responses. Sharing with one another why we are Quakers, what belonging means to us, and what we have found in becoming Friends, enriches the quality of fellowship within Meetings. It also gives us confidence to wear those badges, and be able to answer simply and honestly why we are Quakers.
I know of too many Friends who have such a badge, but won’t wear it because they feel so uncertain about what they will say if someone does ask them: Why are you a Quaker? There is no definite answer. Each of us will grow as we articulate our own response, and as we listen to and learn from other Friends articulating their responses. I chose to draft my own responses in a number of initial points – and stopped when I got to ten. These are just some reasons why I am a Quaker.
Tracy Chevalier has woven together life and writing through a dazzling string of novels, from the acclaimed Girl with a Pearl Earring to the Quaker-inspired The Last Runaway, which tells the story of an English Quaker, Honor Bright, who is gradually drawn into the Underground Railroad in the American state of Ohio. An empathy with the marginalised runs through all her work, along with a fascination with crafts.
She was born in Washington DC and went on to graduate with a degree in English from Oberlin College. She moved to England in 1984 to work in publishing and in the early 1990s did a masters degree in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her tutors included the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain.
How certain can we be, as Friends, that we are not supporting slavery?
Sadly, we cannot be more sure than anyone else that we are not supporting slavery. And that is despite the fact that it was Friends who first invented the concept of conscious consuming and originated the first consumer campaigns to support human rights.
There are some products, especially those that come through the Fairtrade network that can be thought of as ‘safe’, likewise locally-sourced goods are more likely to be slave-free, as well as goods from those companies that make it clear in their labelling (like Monkee Genes) that they are slave-free. For the rest it can be a puzzle and a challenge to trace the supply chains all the way to the criminal first link where slavery exists.
Most of those who become Quakers today will have made a spiritual journey to arrive at this destination. We are now a Society of convinced Friends rather than cradle Quakers. Many daughters and sons of Friends continue their parents’ questing and move beyond the Society, even if holding to Quaker values. Like Tony Philpott I have made that journey. So when his book, From Christian to Quaker: A spiritual journey from evangelical Christian to universalist Quaker, came to hand last Christmas, at that period of calm after the seasonal consumerist tsunami, I avidly devoured it, provoked in part by the implications of its title.
You probably know the proverb that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Growing up Quaker was rather like growing up in a very lovely village, albeit one dispersed across the country and, of course, linked across the world.
As a teenager being Quaker was all about the annual Quaker summer school. I don’t remember a whole lot of talk about God during those weeks, but what I did experience was concentrated love, in a safe, inclusive and open space that gave us each freedom to explore who and what we were. It was an experience I realise now has informed the rest of my life.
"If you truly want to be led you must put yourself in a position that allows following" (PYM)
Though written within a Quaker and Christian context, this book can be used by anyone of any religious faith or secular inclination. The only requirement is a desire to follow, to be guided by, to align with the richness of the ineffable, which this book calls "the Way". This book seeks nothing less than to aid readers in aligning their lives with the same power and richness that animated the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
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