Culture Articles
An Exacting Mistress: The Friends Ambulance Unit in WWII, edited by Antony Barlow
This is a substantial book, well produced, illustrated and indexed. It contains the wartime letters of Ralph Barlow and his wife Joan, the editor’s parents. Ralph was officer in charge of the Middle East Section of the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), and later its deputy director, travelling 30,000 miles...
Poem: Come to Good
May we, in our stillness speak to thee? In this wooden house let us bless each other and be blessed. May we see your glory, hear your peace in this valley of birdsong. We have waited long, and yearned ...
Poem: ...passeth all understanding (Philippians 4:7)
Not a bit of this and that, but tarmac and vapour-trails. Every where? Everything else. This grass, that star among and between in here, over there without membrane or integument.
Salter Lecture 2021: Quaker Values in South Africa’s Struggle, by Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge
The Quaker Socialist Society’s (QSS)Salter lecture, as most Friends will know, is named after social reformers Ada and Alfred. This year’s lecturer, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, former deputy minister of state in South Africa, began by speaking of their ‘amazing lives’. The pair were not thought to have had...
Jews Don’t Count, by David Baddiel
Many Quakers feel uncomfortable when approaching the issue of anti-Semitism. This year there have been firm statements from Friends House condemning the activities of the Israeli government, but nothing specifically about the increasingly violent incidents of anti-Semitism in this country. It is almost as if some Quakers feel that Jews...
We gather
Then, we gathered each week round a broken branch of cherry, or three camellias: one bruised by gusts; one infurled like the fist of an infant, another opening to perfection. Now we gather round the light of this screen: its quilt work of faces stitched by the unseen. We gather...
Hello, Stranger, by Will Buckingham
I was only a few pages into Hello, Stranger when I realised I wished to commend this book to fellow Quakers. Its subjects, which include the experience of being a stranger and the welcome we offer others, challenged me to consider what our current concern with inclusion requires.
Rebelling for Life, by Sue Hampton
This is a short book: a collection of poetry, short stories and other prose dating from 2019 and 2020. Sue starts with a heart-rending wail at the climate crisis. The first poem, written in a police cell after arrest during the London arms fair, takes us through: her physical sensations; the Meeting...
What White People Can Do Next: From allyship to coalition, by Emma Dabiri
After Derek Chauvin’s sentencing for the murder of George Floyd, Floyd’s sister, Bridgett, said: ‘The sentence… shows that matters of police brutality are finally being taken seriously. However, we have a long way to go… before black and brown people finally feel like they are being treated fairly...
Censorship Overruled: An alternative history of 1918, by John Ellison
John Ellison’s short book opens at the beginning of 1918, when there was much discontent over food shortages and prices in Britain. There were many calls for peace, stimulated by Russia’s socialist revolution in 1917. It concentrates on the following eleven months, January to November, with Britain centre-stage.