Culture Articles
Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making meaning in a meaningless universe, by Richard Holloway
In A Little History of Religion, Richard Holloway, a retired bishop of Edinburgh, devoted a whole chapter to Quakerism. Much of what he writes here will also be welcome to Friends, especially those of us who are more non-theist than theist. The author calls himself a Christian even though he...
Letter from Leningrad
Liebschen, forgive me one last letter out of lands bereft of God. Such frost, such cold, I hardly write through hollow blackened fingers here between the blizzards and those guns, eternal casual guns we live to hate. Eyes iced with bitterness that twists and locks each bone
A ragged doll
(A recreation from an incident in Sergei Nikitin’s How Quakers saved Russia.) They came from a far away country. I don’t know how. They did not speak our language. A few words perhaps. Kwakera or something. I remember that now. Foreigners are rare these days. Strange faces but...
Quaker Shaped Christianity: How the Jesus story and the Quaker way fit together, by Mark Russ
The Woodbrooke tutor Mark Russ is known for encouraging Quakers to engage with radical theology. In Quaker Shaped Christianity we learn something more of his journey: first rethinking the Christianity he encountered as a child, then discovering more inclusive spaces like Greenbelt and the Society of Friends.
The Shell Seven, by Margaret Heffernan, for BBC Radio 4
Just over twelve months ago, a group of Extinction Rebellion (XR) protestors made headlines when they were acquitted for criminal damages to Shell’s headquarters, despite having no defence in law, and being indisputably guilty of the charges.
Peace
The peace lily in my bathroom has one white flower: it bows down like a white flag. We have not known peace, do not know its contours, its colours, whether it is shaped like the earth, like the sky...
The Gospels: A new translation, by Sarah Ruden
Like Scrooge, Elizabeth Bennett and Sherlock Holmes, Jesus arrives in our imaginations via the word. Our imagination shapes such characters mysteriously and, we find, mysteriously they shape us. They may not have a life without us, but equally we would not be who we are without them.
Muting for worship, a Shakespearean sonnet from the pandemic
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, By host assigned, I join the breakout room; My sighs and teacup’s clinks make others fraught, If I neglect to mute myself on Zoom.
Strange meeting (after Wilfred Owen)
And suddenly we came upon fellow men, sipping tea in a basket of darkness underneath a hollowed gentle moon. Their voices overcame the stillness of the silvered glade, the whereabouts of mystery
Dowlais Educational Settlement and the Quaker John Dennithorne, by Christine Trevett
Merthyr Tydfil has a long, colourful history. The valley is made up of many distinctive communities, including Treharris (with its Fox, Fell and Penn Streets), through Quakers Yard (with Friends’ burial ground), and on to Aberfan and Dowlais. The area was once famous for iron works and coal mines, but...