Culture Articles
On the quiet
No, not the stasis of the railway waiting room, people held between arrival and hopes for a departure, each coddling their isolation by nosing deeply in a paper or fingering restlessly the keypad on their phone, wondering why the train runs late ...
Quaker Shaped Christianity: How the Jesus story and the Quaker way fit together, by Mark Russ
All Quaker-shaped human beings should read Mark Russ’s book, please. Its title is intended to appeal, it seems, to Christians who are not Quakers and want to know why Quakerism has to be a thing at all. But it also serves to remind Christianity-phobic Friends that the ‘forgetting of...
Home to the harbour lights
Across the ink dark oily sludge, It could not be called water, Surely not, Muck that flowed slow As treacle from the dented Tin in our kitchen cupboard,
The amulet
‘I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.’ The judge echoed the queen, conscious of irony and the risk of own goals. In her domain, rhetoric flows. ‘We’ll pray for him; tell us his name.’
A Simple Faith in a Complicated World: One Quaker’s journey through doubt to faith, by Kate McNally
This book is an introduction to the Quaker way. Most of these are written by convinced Friends trying to make sense of this convincement. The usual dilemmas must be faced: the Quaker way is experiential, so each journey is personal and unique. The language used by Friends is tentative. The...
The Atheist’s Guide to Quaker Process: Spirit-led decisions for the secular, by Selden W Smith
Pendle Hill Quaker Center has a long tradition of publishing Quaker pamphlets that challenge, inform and inspire. This one, number 472, ticks all three boxes. Its target readership is the growing number of non-Quaker nontheists who are employed by Quaker organisations: the men and women recruited partly because there aren’t...
Children of the Stone City, by Beverley Naidoo
Two young siblings use music to resist the authorities, who mistreat and oppress them. Little sister Leila plays Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on her flute, to let her brother know his family is in the overcrowded military court. There, handcuffed and shackled, he’s being led off to solitary...
Reconsidering Reparations, by Olúfẹmi O Táíwò
Olúfémi Táíwò is an academic philosopher who works in the intersection of climate justice and colonialism. This book has helped me better understand some of the issues.
Early Christian Anchorite
To escape this world’s contagion, I will go Forth to the wilderness and build me there A shelter; or a cave find in the hills. Thus will I loose myself from Satan’s ills.
Poem: ‘What the year has left undone’, from the Twelfth month issue, 1854
It is not what my hands have done, That weighs my spirit down, That casts a shadow on the sun, And over earth a frown: It is not any heinous guilt, Or vice by men abhorred; For fair the frame that I have built, A fair...