Culture Articles
Notes from an Apocalypse: A personal journey to the end of the world and back, by Mark O’Connell
How will humans respond to a species-threatening event? Mark O’Connell attempts to answer this question in this very timely new book, written before Covid-19.
The Boy With Two Hearts: A story of hope by Hamed Amiri
This is an inspiring, yet easily read, book about asylum seekers; some Friends may have heard it as BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book of the Week’ a few weeks ago.
Accompaniment, Community and Nature by Jonathan Herbert
Jonathan Herbert started his journey as an accompanier at eight years old, sitting on the vicarage doorstep with rough sleepers. He has since practised accompaniment in urban Liverpool, rural Dorset, the Solomon Islands, Uganda and Palestine. Decades later he has formulated his ideas on the subject, which, he claims, is...
Roger Fry: A biography, by Virginia Woolf
After four years studying English Literature at university, Virginia Woolf stuck in my mind as an author I really needed to look at in more detail in later life. It’s only taken me thirty-five years and a global pandemic to get round to reading her biography of Roger Fry,...
For America in a time of a drought
The rain in the old cemetery is simple. It falls on yarrow, clover, ragwort dispensing pearls into the grain of day, into the Yorick skull-clot of Devon clay. The tissue of the warm-wooded dead is wormed with the first drop of its showers, runs into the finger-hold of tiny oaks,...
Confessions Of A Non-Violent Revolutionary by Chris Savory
This autobiography was written by a peace activist who for a number of years was a Friend. It is an easy-to-read, intriguing and racy record of a resonant journey. I learned a lot about someone with whom I was acquainted but didn’t know at any depth. Particularly striking was...
Ahab in Rehab
Call me male-ish I enjoyed playing doldrums in our school orchestra. And there weren’t really any significant repercussions until I also took up the Bermuda triangle.
‘Our own creativity can best come from deliberately-chosen places of quiet and silence.’
Advices & queries 29 tells us that ‘Old age… can… bring serenity.’ But lockdown has taught me that it might be more widely available. The world’s religions frequently suggest we need places of waiting – places where we accept and go with the flow of life. Lao Tzu asks: ‘Do you...
The Fabricated Christ: Confronting what we know about Jesus and the Gospels, by Paul Laffan
In the beginning was a folktale – a folktale about a holy man, a man of the people, cruelly done to death by the powerbrokers of the day. The man was impish and witty. Some say he was a bit of a devil, while others say he could have saved us,...
To Thine Own Self Be True: A spiritual journey by Howard Grace
This is a small book of thirty-two pages but it is not a quick read – there is much in this gem to reflect on. Howard Grace recounts a journey of four score years from militant atheist, to becoming a believer in ‘shared humanity’ as a Christian, to, finally, a Quaker.