Friends in deed: Jonathan Wooding on the creative power of friendship

‘Friendship isn’t competitive; it confers value.’

by Jonathan Wooding 13th June 2025

Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity must surely be on every Friend’s essential non-fiction reading list. It’s a counter-intuitive presentation of history, with a grand hallelujah on Quakerism’s behalf: ‘It may seem that it was foolish to hope that anything would change as a result of a few people practising friendship… The Society of Friends… has indeed fewer than a quarter of a million members… but it has had more influence on how human beings treat each other than any government ever had, of however powerful an empire.’