‘Iris Murdoch represents a luminous example of much that we hold dear.’ Photo: Ida Kar/National Portrait Gallery
Seeing Iris: A profound Quakerly thinker?, by Jonathan Wooding
‘If we don’t stand up for a particular intellectual tradition, Quakers will continue to be patronised as harmless.’
by Jonathan Wooding
19th February 2021
In the years since I became part of the Society of Friends, no one has ever mentioned Iris Murdoch as representative of Quaker sensibility and thinking. In that same period of time I’ve also become convinced that our post-supernatural, post-fundamentalist condition is naturally Quaker, and is a reasonable contradiction of Sigmund Freud’s position that there’s no future for ‘illusions’ of the religious sort.
