Culture Articles
Vocable (for John)
Ninety now, you’re adrift on the vowel-stream, the crisp edge of all your five languages gone and we’re back to the least of language. It’s all one, your, his or my slight modulations of the bare vowel of animal need… though even there how they give us...
The Angel of Newgate
It is nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. I find myself standing before the Rajah Quilt in the National Museum of Australia. This treasured piece of history, at eleven feet across, is much larger than I had imagined and I feel humbled as I view its rich shades of...
Voice of the morning
Thank you, Lord, for preventing me from bursting in on the day, like a bull in a china shop: instead, to have me sitting quietly, in the silence marking its beginning;
The Hexham Debates
On a Saturday morning in January 2007, some Quakers arranged a public meeting to be addressed by Bruce Kent. Parliament was about to debate the renewal of Britain’s nuclear-armed submarines, so the topic was ‘What Price Trident?’ The setting was a church hall in a small market town near...
Quo vadis Libya?
No matter how much things change they remain the same, in Libya this is true. Tribe fights against tribe brutality is returned by more brutality.
The world of Joseph Wood
The publication this month of a full and unedited transcription of the large and small notebooks of Joseph Wood, a Yorkshire Quaker, will provide a significant new resource for those with an interest in Quaker history and genealogy. The hundred notebooks, written between 1773 and 1821, together with 647 letters and miscellaneous printed...
Death shall not prevail
On 22 July, exactly three months ago, Anders Behring Breivik, a thirty-two year old Norwegian, set off a car bomb outside government buildings in Oslo. It killed eight of his fellow countrymen. An hour and a half later, dressed as a policeman, he landed on the small island of Utøya...
In everyone
I don’t believe we are a sick society I don’t believe we are a broken society. I believe we are a complex society, a fragile society, a beautiful society.
Posters for peace
The poster has been used as an instrument of radical protest for hundreds of years: pasted on walls, carried in processions and held up in demonstrations, it has been a cheap, portable, and visually striking way of speaking ‘truth to power’. Peace posters are part of the Quaker tradition and...
Costing not less than everything
‘I want to see us living our testimony in such a way that other people think not just, “Quakers – peace” but also, “Quakers – peace – the environment”.’ Pam Lunn