Culture Articles
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...
The Struggle for India’s Soul: Nationalism and the fate of democracy, by Shashi Tharoor
This book was precipitated by Narendra Modi’s second term as prime minister of India. The country is becoming more autocratic, like Hungary and Turkey. The title suggests that something mystical, or at least spiritual, is in danger of being lost, but that is not what Shashi Tharoor is arguing...
The body of truth
Each season the cannibals selected one truth to kill. We eat its eyes, its lungs, the soft seed of the heart. They spoke to us so honestly we asked, ‘And how do you select which truth to sacrifice? The truth of hatred or of greed?’
Paul Among the People: The apostle reinterpreted and reimagined in his own time, by Sarah Ruden
This book is an attempt to look again at the accusations of homophobia, excessive puritanism and general grumpiness that are routinely levelled against the apostle Paul. Sarah Ruden is a Quaker scholar, and her approach is to set Paul in the context of his time. This is not an attempt...
Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is taking over the world, by Elle Hardy
Pentecostals now comprise one quarter of the world’s Christians, up from just six per cent in 1980. By 2050, one billion people will be part of the movement. The cliché about Pentecostalism is that it is about health, wealth, and the second coming of Christ. It holds that after forgiveness we...
Compassion and suffering: Clive Ashwin has some lessons from the arts
Landscape with Man Killed by a Snake, by the French seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin (on display at the National Gallery, and pictured) tells a curious and macabre story. In the foreground a man lies dead at the edge of a lake, in the coils of a huge serpent. A second...