Culture Articles
Marcus Borg and God
Borg, Marcus Borg. I met him about six years ago. He was introduced to me by a Friend from another Meeting when we were on a course at Woodbrooke – and it was love at first sight! Well, not quite ‘sight’ as he wasn’t there in person. The Friend recommended...
The Judas Passion
The Passion story is told for the first time from the perspective of Judas Iscariot in a new work for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment: The Judas Passion. Sally Beamish, who is a member of Glasgow Meeting, has composed the music and she explains that her Quaker background...
A long way down
The title poem of Averil Stedeford’s The Long Way Down: Poems of Grief and Hope sets the tone for this recently published collection of poetry. It is simple, explicit and accessible, yet contains personal and poignant truths.
The debate
Like those quotidian voices, And the child in the warm kitchen Clinging close to her father’s knee; Against that well-armed hot debate, In the shell blasts of emotion, By a chamber carried about On the batons of fear and hate, My small poems were swept away – They said, with...
George Jacob Holyoake
In 1842 George Jacob Holyoake became the last person in this country to be convicted of blasphemy in a public lecture, delivered at the Cheltenham Mechanics Institute. In reply to a question from the audience, he had wondered that, in view of the cost of the church, whether we were not...
Naming the animals
Even if you couldn’t read it, in previous centuries the Bible was thought important. It had a kind of magic power. It might even be useful: being able to quote a verse of Psalm 51 might save you from the gallows. Nowadays the Bible, for many people, would be handier...
Images of Christ: Standing at God’s right hand
Like Coventry Cathedral, the location of last month’s art work, Llandaff Cathedral in South Wales was heavily bombed during the second world war. When it was repaired in the 1950s, one unusual feature added to the twelfth century cathedral was a contemporary version of a medieval roodscreen, intended to...
Words and images in Glasgow
As part of Refugee Week 2017 Glasgow Meeting played host to two challenging plays. Journeymen Theatre performed a double bill: Feeding the Darkness, on state-sanctioned torture, and The Bundle, which tells the story of a woman negotiating the UK asylum system. Simultaneously, we welcomed This Light that Pushes Me, a photographic...
Images of Christ: Tablets of the law, tablets of the word
Words set in stone have a long history in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The first version of the Ten Commandments was believed to have been inscribed by the finger of God (Exodus 31:18). Funerary inscriptions from the Roman catacombs are among the earliest visual forms of Christian witness. They are characterised by...
Moment’s benediction
A moment takes place between seeing and knowing we’ve seen. A moment of awe, a small benediction as when I met a fox in the lane, and we paused and looked at the otherness of other.