Culture Articles
Today I am giving up judgement
It drops but not like a knife skittering across the kitchen floor… The faces across from me: wind- bitten, old and close as mountain streams bloom in the rose steam of Hibiscus tea. I wonder how I hadn’t noticed their beauty in just this way before. Even the dog...
Battles of Conscience: British pacifists and the second world war, by Tobias Kelly
Making the choice to be a pacifist can never be easy, but being a conscientious objector (CO) in time of war must be much harder. In world war two, COs were generally treated with more sympathy than they had been in world war one, but their decision was often complicated...
First Friend
Fox by name, George by birth, Earth-Quaker elevated to silent spokesman caught in the fault line of a civil war. Let us live simply, a postscript Penn of beatitudes maintaining a silence towards slavery louder than fear of a good-god inhabiting the crucible colours hung on Calvary.
Transitional, by Munroe Bergdorf
‘In one way or another, we all transition’ is the strapline under the title of this book. How true that is of us as individuals, and of us as a community.
Last Sunday
To Harvey Gillman Last Sunday I was prompted by love and truth to read out your poem ‘Gloria’ for it seemed particularly apt. Walking to our Meeting House in the keen east wind, I’d passed the bus stop, next bus fifty minutes hence.
The Thirteenth Angel, by Philip Gross
Philip Gross is not a Quaker mystic, if that’s what you’re thinking when you see the word ‘angel’ in the title of his latest book of poems. He’s not a Quaker ranter, either, I might say – not angry and satirical, which he could have been, what with...
The garden
Who they were, what they did, and which one was to blame is what the merry-go-round of sages pondered, dancing on the proverbial pin. And pondered also down the ages if the sin was ersatz or original, or even half and half, and if it started with a forked tongue
Dining With Diplomats, Praying With Gunmen by Anne Bennett
This book arose from a conference held at Woodbrooke in 2019, at which experienced conciliators and younger peace activists came together. I was guided towards it by a Friend who shares my concern at the partisan approach of many British Friends to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Gloria
A poetic meditation inspired by Isaac Pennington Submit to the light, they said. Open your eyes to its glory. It will show, purge, strengthen you; direct your feet. My friend, give over your willing, give over your desiring, sink to the seed, which God sows in your heart. It will...
The Prison Psychiatrist’s Wife, by Sue Johnson
This is a beautifully-written account of the experience of working creatively in a top security setting. It is a strongly-felt account, by our friend Sue Johnson, of what it was like to be alongside her ground-breaking psychiatrist husband Bob Johnson as they put original ideas of creativity, compassion, and challenge...