Culture Articles
Christmas rhyme
Deck the universal mess in brittle tinsel! ’Tis the season for a public pantomime Two-thousand-and-sixteen reasons to be cheerful – ho! ho! Scramble into this year’s Christmas rhyme. It’s the season for unreasonable reverting, Fix the hinges, put up beds for dad and mam, Prepare to face the feast...
Hallelujah
A meditation on Christmas, set to the metre of the late Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ There is a story very old about some shepherds in the cold who say they saw an angelic host before them. The angels told them of a birth that God had come to visit Earth...
Is anybody there?
There are few writers on religion whose books are guaranteed bestsellers. The former bishop of Edinburgh and head of the Anglican church in Scotland is one of them. From Godless Morality in 1999, through a series culminating in A Little History of Religion, Richard Holloway’s deep affection for religious tradition,...
Lessons from the past
The value of the past to inform, inspire and challenge us today is given a very telling validation in John Lampen’s excellent new book, A Letter from James: Essays in Quaker history.
An alternative Christmas
Christmas is, when a child is born, any child, anywhere – bringing with it, if only for a single moment, that spark of heavenly glory, as a reminder and a promise, that all can be made new.
The life well spoken
When a person you know and respect writes an authentic autobiography, which touches on aspects of your own life journey, almost every page holds some fascination that brings both enjoyment and challenge. This is my experience of Brian Brown’s Born to be Free – The indivisibility of Freedom, subtitled A...
A Christmas Day
To have had one is barrier-leaping, to have had two is beginning to be a custom, but to have had three major musical premieres performed in London’s Royal Festival Hall is surely a rarity to be recognised. Such are the unique gifts of Quaker composer Tony Biggin. Following performances...
Through a glass darkly
In 2015 Derek Guiton published a book entitled A Man that Looks on Glass. It highlighted what he felt was ‘a crisis in British Quakerism’ – a ‘growing secularisation’ within the Religious Society of Friends. There were two movements and they represented competing and ‘incompatible belief systems’. A group of nonthesists were...
Enemy aliens
How often do you have the chance of ridding someone you know of a demon that has bound her family for 100 years? My Friday Meeting friend, sometime in 2015, began telling me of her German grandfather, Rudolf, who had been interned as an enemy alien in Alexandra Palace, alongside 3,000 others, from 1914...
Viking economics
The phrase ‘there is no alternative’ came into circulation in the early 1980s. It was used by Margaret Thatcher to justify the economic reforms of her government and enabled acceptance of a ‘new normal’: an economy of cruelty rather than compassion, an economics that ignores the problems and threats of...