Culture Articles
In the Large Meeting House
It’s time… Friends scurry and bustle into the Meeting room where they slowly settle shifting like dogs on blankets ...
A climate for concern
In March a book that I have been working on for nearly six years was finally published. Beacons: Stories for our not so distant future is a collection of original short stories by some of Britain’s finest writers. They were tasked with finding new narratives to encompass the enormity...
One unholy journey
‘I guess’, wrote Jill Green in the beautifully illustrated leaflet, which was part of her show of twelve years’ work during Oxford Arts Week in May, ‘I guess I am asking to join the ranks of war artists’. She calls the show One Unholy Journey. This refers to her own...
The Last Runaway
This quietly remarkable novel teaches us a good deal about mid-nineteenth century American Quakers. In doing so, it has confirmed and enlightened for me what it means to be a Quaker in early twenty-first century Britain.
Poetry saves my soul
Poetry is my way out of a deep dark hole It brightens up my soul, gets the depression out.
Lincoln and leadership
Abraham Lincoln had many qualities a Quaker would want in a leader: clear vision of what he sought to achieve based on ethical principles, combined with a sensitive and compassionate approach to the people he met. These qualities came out strongly in the recently released Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln, which...
Syria found
The Arab League has nailed its colours to the mast but Russia and China have vetoed UN resolutions
Living our discernment
In A Small Share in History: A Quaker initiative in Eastern Europe Diana and John Lampen describe a Quaker initiative – visiting Belarus and Ukraine between 1991 and 2004 (at the time these countries were emerging from the Soviet Union) – sharing methods of creative conflict handling in schools and inter-active classroom approaches; and...
Friends Meeting House, Frenchay, Bristol
When the doors of the house are shut, Eyes lidded, mouth closed, nose and ears Doing their best to idle, fingers allowed out Only on parole; when the lovely holy distractions, Safe scaffolding of much-loved formulae, Have been rubbed away; then the plant Begins to grow. It is hard to...
Here
Here, silence amongst the great and the fallen nearby, a meadow of cornflower blue and poppy red, a place of remembrance, reflecting sorrow and loss: of sacrifices given and honour to the dead.