Culture Articles
Twist of Love, by Rosemary May Wells
Rosemary May Wells’ fourth collection of poems is the companion to her first, God is an Onion. It encompasses global and everyday life events, as well as people and friendships, and the natural world and the local area. All this is done with warmth, love and grace.
Feet
Firmly grounded, side by side, orderly. While others dangle nonchalantly, mid-careless-air, an imper- ceptible swing to them.
What’s Eating the Universe? And other cosmic questions, by Paul Davies
This book, written with Paul Davies’ trademark clarity and humour, answers many questions we may have about contemporary physics. For example, does it still believe in anti-matter? Somewhat embarrassingly, we read that the first anti-matter particle, the positron, an electron with a positive charge, was discovered ninety years ago. On...
Meeting for Zooming
The screens reflected in their eyes, each sits in a familiar room, Friends – silent, chatty, busy, wise – united by the Quaker Zoom.
Until We Reckon: Violence, mass incarceration, and a road to repair, by Danielle Sered
The movement for prison abolition has a strong voice in this book. Danielle Sered offers pragmatic alternatives, meeting the needs of survivors and suggesting ways for people who have committed violence to repair harm. She argues that reckoning is owed not only by people who have caused violence, but by...
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