Culture Articles
Posters for peace
The Northern Friends Peace Board is dipping into a rich archival pool to mark its centenary next year. A calendar for 2013, which draws on a selection of several hundred posters from the Board’s collection, is the first in a number of centenary initiatives. Posters were one of the main...
The Fire and the Hammer
The Fire and the Hammer is an epic work – with readers, chorus, soloists, piano and percussion – that recounts the story of young George Fox and the founding of Quakerism. It was composed by Tony Biggin and has a libretto by Alec Davison.
Memorandum of a passage to England
My beloved friend Samuel having taken a cabin For himself in the ship called Mary and Elizabeth (James Sparks the master), wept when I spake to him, I feeling a prompting in my heart to travel steerage
Dying to live
Being familiar with the gospels can lead us into thinking that we know Jesus and his teaching very well. Then, when you read a book by a writer who has steeped himself in the text, and the context in which the author was writing, new perspectives dawn. John Churcher is...
Staying true
Lynn Waddington was a Huckleberry child. Her river was the Delaware, idling through South Jersey, shared with brother and sister and swimming muskrats. A child in a natural world, she wrote, ‘can hear the footsteps of beetles far away.’ The family home sat without neighbours for many years until the...
Elsie
A nursing home. At ninety-three, your memory almost gone, You wonder where your mother is, and where is brother Don? You do not know what place this is, nor whether you belong. Worst of all, you are aware of something sadly wrong.
Thoughts from the moon
He stepped on the moon And saw to his delight, The planet Earth, blue and beautiful, Hung in the sky. It evoked weightlessness Held by miraculous magnetism.
The Snettisham Saga
Beneath the tent an archaeologist mole is heard blindly tunnelling for worms building hills as he goes. A snuffling hedgehog cleans pots and pans, whilst trusty giant poplars await our return through a sneaky hole in the hedge shielding us from the icy blast.
Presence in the midst
The picture ‘The presence in the midst’ is one that I have seen in many Meeting houses. It depicts a deeply gathered Quaker Meeting of former years, with the genders segregated, and the filmy figure of Jesus as the otherwise unseen presence.
Wisdom
Is there any real place for wisdom in our frenetic, postmodern, quasi-apocalyptic, multi-tasking, dual- income, economically challenging world? This is one of the questions Stephen S Hall asks in Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. He maintains that among ordinary people there is a hunger for any excuse to raise their...