Culture Articles
Human Traces, by Sebastian Faulks
This book is about two doctors, one French, Jacques, one English, Thomas. They form a close friendship. Jacques marries Thomas’ sister Sonia. The story begins in the 1880s when mentally ill people are locked away, often indefinitely, in lunatic asylums. They are called ‘aliens’. Those caring for them are known...
Do Quakers Pray?, by Jennifer Kavanagh
Many of us already know and value Jennifer Kavanagh’s first book in the Quaker Quicks series, Practical Mystics, in which she explores the spiritually-attuned faith-in-action of Quaker experience. Her latest addition to the series helps us to think through, with wonder, the multifaceted nature of prayer as experienced by...
Peace! Books! Freedom! The secret history of a radical London building, by Rosa Schling
A small group of volunteers has been working on the digitisation of Peace News, a publication with which many Friends will be familiar. Coincidentally, as the run from 1950-1959 was uploaded, a new oral history was published of 5 Caledonian Road, the premises that Peace News occupied in 1959 (and which continues...
Bible and Poetry, by Michael Edwards
This book begins with the bold assertion that ‘we do not read the Bible as it is meant to be read’. After a sentence that casts shade on traditional theological approaches, its author goes on to explain that it’s ‘the presence of poetry in the Bible’ that is ‘the...
Callings, by Lucy Rushton
At the last Meeting for Sufferings, held in Leeds at the beginning of October, I met my f/Friend Lucy Faulkner Gawlinski. She had recently published a novel, Callings, under her maiden name of Rushton. She gave me a copy as a gift.
In the Atlas mountains
Five faces and a white-nose ass disrupting dust rise up the slope of olive trees
Beneath sufferance stones
He had been digging his four year old daughter out of the earth. We know this because there was no choice, witnessing him burst his straining back, splitting spinal minor chords of both himself, as in parent and child, as in dead daughter. Now he lies fixed...
Garden lessons
There is more than one way of calling in the seed. A woman may sit in a garden of young blossoms showing their faces to sun for the first time, and wait for words to take root. Soil knows the spell of waiting just as the robin knows the right...
Ashes and diamonds
There are no diamonds in the ashes of despair. Anger writhes along each cortège as broken souls go down to brandished flags and guns. Hope seems lost.
Listening post
Silence is hardly pure. Life engenders Breathing aloud, spider steps, and white noise – Your nerves fretting to their own agendas – But there seems to be a spirit that employs What rises from near quiet. Just recall When Elijah, bloodied by raw righteousness, In hiding unclear how fate might befall, Heard...