Culture Articles
Thought for the Week: Sunday Meeting
A pocket of silence to slip into Where warmth and quietness rule Waiting for the fidgeting to subside. – The rustle of a raincoat – The creak of an old bench – The tick of the clock measuring...
Being Christian
Rowan Williams, in his book Being Christian, has some thought processes and ways of articulating his religion that are alien to someone with my scientific background. I found it, however, a fascinating and sometimes amusing work that contains a clever juggling with ideas. In my teens I was a born-again...
Mykene
Summer morning come heat on the wine-field and the lizards crinkle understone. In olive groves cicadas chirr and the blunt lion-gate lies open to the horde. Those hills opposite were purple in the dawn, now fragments in a heat like...
Daisy
Daisy comes to Meeting, greets us as she enters with a throaty wruff, lifts her big body round to nose each person, fur softer than silk, eyes wet with doggy love. We sit in our silent circle.
Love matters
Now that he has retired from life as a professional economist, David Cadman wants to talk to us about the power of Love. In his book, Love Matters, he tells us ‘in Earth days I am old. And I love according to my age – foolishly, deeply and without condition’. All...
The Meeting house plane tree
I looked at the tree with an upward glance When its thousands of leaves were in merry dance, Wrestling in joy with the boisterous breeze Like a sailing-ship on surging seas.
The Gates of Greenham
Thirty years ago, on Easter Monday 8 April 1985, what is reputed to be the largest gathering of Friends in the twentieth century assembled in the Royal Festival Hall, London. It was the premiere of a peace passion, The Gates of Greenham, to celebrate a four-year ongoing witness of the women’s...
A Sustainable Life
A year or so ago I was chatting with a Friend about our Quaker engagement with sustainability. He said: ‘it’s part of our DNA now.’ And it is. It has long been the focus of conversations in Local Meetings about what it means to ‘let your life speak’. It...
The challenge of fiction
‘I am interested in what constitutes loneliness and in the difference between solitude and loneliness.’ Jennifer Kavanagh is best known for a series of thoughtful non-fiction works on subjects such as travel, spirituality, homelessness and aspects of Quakerism. The quote above gave an insight into the link between the authorâ€...
Fields of Blood
There is much in Karen Armstrong’s new book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence that is of importance to Quakers. The author says that she embarked upon writing it in order to counteract the common misconception that wars and large-scale violence are caused by religion. In...