Culture Articles
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.
Laurence Lerner
In its leaning on language, poetry can only be written by someone with a feel for the power of words, yet paradoxically it’s an attempt to shake free of words and find the ‘thisness’ of experience, the underlying actuality that words are a way of capturing. How obvious it...
Conscientious Objector
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death. I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor. He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning. But...
Reading the Bible
The Book of the People – How to Read the Bible is a new book by A N Wilson, a prolific writer of histories and novels. As the title implies, his concern here is more about the readers than the writers of the diversity of books that comprise it.
Poem: The Listening Walk
Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey’s madrigal. Basil Bunting, Briggflatts We straggle across a stubble field, tuned in to the rasp of straws, squeak-clunk of a kissing-gate, our own breath as we climb to a solitary oak, its bell of shade.
Spiritual activism: leadership as service
‘Activism is all about putting our highest values into practice in the world. Spirituality involves an awareness of where those values come from… our motives, passions and drives.’ This is the crux of the message of Spiritual Activism: Leadership as Service by Alastair McIntosh and Matt Carmichael. It is a...