Culture Articles
Open for transformation: Being Quaker
Open For Transformation: Being Quaker is, for me, one of the most important and timely Swarthmore Lectures for a long time. I write from the perspective of one of the majority of British Friends who was not at Bath to hear the lecture by Ben Pink Dandelion at first hand....
Quakers remembered
A unique piece of community theatre, Quakers in the first world war: A commemoration, was given two performances on Saturday 13 September at Jordans Meeting House in Buckinghamshire. The performances coincided with the one hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), whose first training camp was at...
Robert Spence
Robert Spence was born in Tynemouth in 1871 into a Quaker family and trained as an artist in London and Paris. While he painted in oils, he is best known for his dry-point etchings. Many of his etchings were based on events described in The Journal of George Fox. His style...
Icons
Vaideeni, Romania It’s a long way from gothic-gaunt steeples meant to prod God beyond reach. This one’s a gingerbread loaf. Colours like a country fair, flocks of saints up the walls, rugs, candlelight, grannies in headscarves, golden syrup of polyphonic chanting.
Classic lasagne
Firstly, make the meat sauce warning: this may disturb the supersensitive mask your eyes, muffle your ears bodies explode from planes wars always mangle us indiscriminately life is just like that
Progressive Friends
Last year I spent three months at Pendle Hill near Philadelphia. One of the things that made that time special was encountering Chuck Fager, who was there undertaking research into a branch of American Quakerism called Progressive Friends. Chuck is known as a prolific, if sometimes controversial, writer on a...
Diversity of art at Bath
Celebrating the publication of his thirteenth novel this week, Howard Jacobson wrote ‘To lose oneself in making art – all questions of quality apart – is an incomparable way of living life. Never mind self-expression. The truly wonderful thing about being a painter, a writer or a musician is escaping self.’ It...
Art at Yearly Meeting Gathering
The futility of war
On Friday 1 August Sally Beamish’s Violin Concerto, based on the theme of war, is being given a London premiere at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms season. The programme, commemorating 100 years since the outbreak of the first world war, includes William Walton’s Symphony No.1...
The things which kill
When blinded Polyphemus chose a rock To hurl at bold Odysseus in his flight, His weapon was as one from cave-man’s stock; Its simple function: death to expedite!