Culture Articles
Word
The questing Spirit lights the receptive soul. Stirring, the mind in turn conceives a thought. The beating heart sends fresh blood to the brain To forge words whence the sentence may be wrought.
From Beatrice to Beatrix
I recently came into Quaker membership and my Area Meeting clerk asked if I would like Quaker faith & practice as a gift. It was lovely to know that my becoming a Quaker would be marked in this way, but I already had a copy and, so, proposed an alternative:...
The history of silence
Sometimes, as Quakers, we may be inclined to think that we have a corner in silence, that this marks our special place within the broad range of Christian practice. But that is hardly so and this remarkable book puts us in our place. It is the latest work by Diarmaid...
The Nayler Passion
In the summer of 2006 I was immersed in rehearsals of the latest Leaveners youth theatre project George and the Chocolate Factory in Birmingham. Over the dinner table one evening discussion turned to the question of ‘what next?’. The Leaveners had seen musical explorations of the lives of George Fox, Elizabeth...
Summer thoughts
As I lay here dozing on the lawn, I can hear the sound of children, Their joyful shrieks of delight at scoring a goal, And the glee in their laughter as they begin to win the game. The sound of the trees gently swaying in the breeze, The sound of...
Sam Peel
It is exciting to come across a new book that tells a remarkable story of a Quaker life. Sam Peel: A man who did different is a biography written by his granddaughter, Susan Wild, and was recently published by the Wells Local History Group. Sam was born in Stapleford, Hertfordshire,...
Beyond forgiving
South Africans Ginn Fourie and Letlapa Mphahlele form an unlikely team: a white Christian woman and a black atheist man. One has suffered directly from the actions of the other, but both have been victims – and risen beyond their pain. What brings them together is a profound story of tragedy...
Journey into life
Of all Christian traditions, Quakers are most committed to a mystical understanding of religion. They share this understanding with the Carthusians and Cistercians, and with the mystics of the Church. This explains why George Fox felt such affinity with the sixteenth-century Lutheran mystic Jakob Boehme. It is also why our...
Lover of souls
The love I bear to the souls of all men makes me willing to undergo whatever can be inflicted on me – Elizabeth Hooton Elizabeth Hooton’s words came to life for me on 21 June in Rugby Meeting House. Lynn Morris’s one woman show, Lover of Souls, opened with...
Endings and beginnings
While visiting Cape Town recently, I was shaken by an inequality that made it hard to relax. Townships with savage poverty exist as ghettos a few miles away from the most expensive real estate in Africa. In the modest flat where we stayed there were three lines of security. A...