Culture Articles
‘Singing is transformative. It lifts our spirits; it heals; it is creative.’
Imagine being in bed and finally asleep after a tense day. Then, before dawn, before the cocks crow, a terrible loud hammering on the door. Your children wail, startled from their sleep. Men burst in and then there is chaos. Now you are elsewhere, still in your night clothes, not...
‘The Time for Peace is Now: Gospel music about us’ – Various Artists
When Pops Staples first got his family together to sing it was at his brother’s church. It was 1948, with all that meant for a black musical group in the USA, even one touring churches: segregation, harrassment and worse. But one of those churches was Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in...
‘Peace Camping: A history’ by Michael Waugh
In his many years of campaigning against nuclear weapons, Michael Waugh has taken part in a large number of Peace Camps, some well known and some barely known beyond the activist community. He has established a reputation for encyclopaedic knowledge of the peace movement, which has led him to put...
Understanding, Nurturing and Working Effectively with Vulnerable Children in Schools by Angela Green
As a tutor on our Area Meeting’s ‘Peaceful Schools’ project I found a lot of parallels with the work of Quaker Angela Greenwood. We Friends have been talking a lot about the need to really hear what others are saying, rather than just reacting to attitudes and behaviour we...
‘The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code’ by Judith Hoare
This is the story of the Australian doctor Claire Weekes (1903-1990). It is fascinating. Weekes was first a zoologist, specialising in the development of the placenta in mammals, for which she received a doctorate in science. She found a species of lizard which sometimes laid eggs and sometimes gave birth...
‘Small Things’
I am not sure what they are using. Small things to trick the morning into night? Or to trick the night into morning?
‘The Offbeat Bible: The old stories retold’, by Paul Hunt
Modernisations of Bible stories go back, in English, at least to the eighth-century Dream of the Rood, in which the Crucifixion is narrated by the cross itself. Before the Reformation, such rewritings, supplementing the sketchy narratives of the Bible, generally aimed to increase the readers’/hearers’ devotion. Now the picture...
The holy city
Therefore I have sailed the seas and come to the holy city of Byzantium. WB Yeats.
‘Berlin to London: An emotional history of two refugees’ by Esther Saraga
One might think the market is flooded with books about and by refugees, but this one is an exceptional treat. It is a combination of a couple’s personal story (Wolja and Lotte) and a context reseached meticulously by their daughter, Esther Saraga.
‘Gandhi the Organiser. How he shaped a nationwide rebellion: India 1915-1922’ by Bob Overy
Advices & queries enjoins us to live ‘in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars’. But however well-intentioned we might be, our everyday lives are enmeshed within institutions and structures that sow the seeds of war. Furthermore, while we might be able...