Culture Articles
What are Quakers?
At heart we Quakers are mystics, Experiencing the Light, We trust in love and peace, And choose to heal, not fight.
Salter Lecture: Red Flag over Bermondsey
Ada Salter was a pioneer of ethical socialism and an important figure in the story of radical politics in early twentieth century Britain. While familiar to many Quakers, she is not widely recognised outside the Religious Society of Friends. Most people do not know that she was only the fifteenth...
Indra’s net
When Indra made the world, some Indian sages said, he shaped it as a net. At every intersection on the net the god fastened a pearl.
Petals and bullets
The book Petals and Bullets: Dorothy Morris - New Zealand Nurse in the Spanish Civil War by Mark Derby is a well-written and absorbing story. It is based mainly on eighty personal and evocative letters written by Dorothy Morris to her family in New Zealand between 1937 and 1946. In these years...
Photography and conflict
Last December an exhibition of work by the photographer Don McCullin was held at Hauser and Wirth in Bruton entitled ‘Conflict, people, landscape’. The show ran until the end of January 2016. I followed the exhibition online and was interested in the responses to it. I loved it: fifty-five powerful images...
Treasure beneath the hearth
The Quaker approach to the Christian scriptures is a radical one, not well understood either among Friends, nor the wider Christian community. George Fox and Robert Barclay were always clear that they valued not so much the words of scripture, as the Spirit, the source from which those words sprang ...
What the mystics knew
Richard Rohr is a seventy-three-year-old American Franciscan. He has been writing about spirituality for a long time, and it’s beginning to show. He seems to have something like an ageing writer’s version of in vino veritas, which may be interpreted thus: ‘Damn it all! I’m going to...
Jesus of Nazareth
He’d worked intensively to bring people to God consciousness with variable success. He must have known where his actions would lead. Was he tired depressed even at the magnitude of the task he had embraced?
Water of Life
Austerity
Mark Blyth has written a clever, well-argued book that we should all read. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea analyses the economic theory that wages and prices should be reduced, as part of budget cuts, in order to return an economy to a successful competitive state.