Culture Articles
Ukraine
In the market place Where the few stalls left Are flanked by the rubble Of shopping centres, apartment blocks And a still smouldering maternity clinic, The longest queues are for seeds.
The Difficult Conversation, by Journeymen Theatre
This play was commissioned by Quaker Concern Over Population, and visits a whole raft of pressing issues. Dave and Lynn Morris, the authors and performers, write: ‘This play is not able to provide answers to the complex environmental changes we are now seeing and the adaptations our children and grandchildren...
Poem: Quaker Meeting
This is the time when we climb up God All of us on one rope, silent and looking up, Struggling through darkness to light…
Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making meaning in a meaningless universe, by Richard Holloway
In A Little History of Religion, Richard Holloway, a retired bishop of Edinburgh, devoted a whole chapter to Quakerism. Much of what he writes here will also be welcome to Friends, especially those of us who are more non-theist than theist. The author calls himself a Christian even though he...
Letter from Leningrad
Liebschen, forgive me one last letter out of lands bereft of God. Such frost, such cold, I hardly write through hollow blackened fingers here between the blizzards and those guns, eternal casual guns we live to hate. Eyes iced with bitterness that twists and locks each bone
A ragged doll
(A recreation from an incident in Sergei Nikitin’s How Quakers saved Russia.) They came from a far away country. I don’t know how. They did not speak our language. A few words perhaps. Kwakera or something. I remember that now. Foreigners are rare these days. Strange faces but...
Quaker Shaped Christianity: How the Jesus story and the Quaker way fit together, by Mark Russ
The Woodbrooke tutor Mark Russ is known for encouraging Quakers to engage with radical theology. In Quaker Shaped Christianity we learn something more of his journey: first rethinking the Christianity he encountered as a child, then discovering more inclusive spaces like Greenbelt and the Society of Friends.
The Shell Seven, by Margaret Heffernan, for BBC Radio 4
Just over twelve months ago, a group of Extinction Rebellion (XR) protestors made headlines when they were acquitted for criminal damages to Shell’s headquarters, despite having no defence in law, and being indisputably guilty of the charges.
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.