Culture Articles
A new kind of growth
Twitter Friends of mine will know that I arrived a day late at the table. It took me some time to orientate myself, and understand some of the complexities of Yearly Meeting Gathering. The rest will no doubt follow in good time. Still, like the labourers in the vineyard, in...
Pilgrims’ procession
It is a long way from Lindisfarne to the coasts of Essex, but in 653AD a Celtic missionary, saint Cedd, made the voyage and used the stones of a ruined Roman fort to build the first Christian church in the territory of the East Saxons. Through a happy chance, the...
The life you can save
On your way to work you pass an unaccompanied toddler, drowning in a shallow pond. ‘Wading in is safe and easy, but you will ruin your new shoes… get your suit wet and muddy… and be late for work.’ Practically everyone would agree that you have a moral duty to...
Food, Friends and Fellowship
Food, Friends and Fellowship begins with a little about Quakers and sharing, then starts like any good meal with a grace. The introduction is followed by the recipes in sections: first we get ‘sweet things’ and then ‘savouries and things’; the savouries section being subdivided into soups, salads, fish, meat...
Time to end our binge-flying culture
We are at a unique moment in history. Today we twenty-somethings are the most powerful generation that have ever lived. As scientists piece together the likely ramifications of our energy intensive lifestyles it is becoming more and more clear that we are the generation that have to start making fast,...
Quiet sensibility and unobtrusive skill
The Cinder Path by Andrew Motion. Faber and Faber. ISBN: 978 057124 492 8. £12.99.
Allotments are back in fashion!
Judy Kirby recalls the Allotment Committee’s work from 1926 to 1946 and Molly Scott Cato looks at the current Stroud Cooperative Agriculture project
Remembering the treasure we have in each other
Quakers from Britain Yearly Meeting have supported people and programmes in former Yugoslavia for eighteen years. The formal institutional support has now come to an end. The former Quaker representatives in the region tell us what was done
Viva Voting! Viva Zille!
The first South African election of 1994 – after apartheid – is right up there with the fall of the Berlin Wall as one of the mythical events of democratic history: the long queues, the long waits, the good-humoured patience and stoicism, the transcendent joy of a country full of people...
Committed partnerships and marriage: the issue is equality not ‘what people do in bed’
Lesbian, gay and bisexual Quakers, meeting at the end of April, were united in the view that Britain Yearly Meeting’s response to the recognition of same-sex committed partnerships must be focused on equality and not on ‘what people do in bed’. The planned sessions at Yearly...