Culture Articles
The fruits of conversation
Rooted in Christianity, Open to New Light – Quaker spiritual diversity by Timothy Ashworth and Alex Wildwood, Pronoun Press in partnership with Woodbrooke. ISBN 978 0 955 6183 3 8. £9. This book comes at the same time as the deadline of the Friends Quarterly essay competition on the future of Quakerism in Britain and in some...
Hard Rain
We learn a lot about big environmental disasters but we may overlook the pollution we ourselves cause. Lights left on in empty rooms, car journeys that could have been cycle rides, heat pouring out of badly insulated homes, shopping taken home in single-use plastic bags. Our small acts of pollution...
Not all of one mind
Occupied Minds: A journey through the Israeli psyche by Arthur Neslen, Pluto Press. ISBN 0 7453 2365 0. £16.99. Who are the Israelis? We may think we know – proud, motivated Jews defending their right to a homeland. But is it true? Some of the people Arthur Neslen spoke to in his psychic journey...
An invented people?
The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, translated by Yael Lotan, Verso. 2009. ISBN: 978 1 84467 422 0. £18.99. Spanish Jews are largely descended from converted Berber tribes from North Africa; Yemenite Jews are descendents of an Arabian tribe; many Jews from Eastern Europe come from Turkic Khazar stock; modern Palestinians are largely...
My Name is Asher Lev
My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. Penguin. ISBN 978 014119 056 3. £9.99. Asher Lev is a young man who makes waves in his community. It is a strict orthodox one in 1950s New York, burdened with the rescue of Jews in hostile lands. Asher’s father works for the Ladover community Rebbe,...
Daniel Deronda
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 014043 427 9. £8.99. Rereading George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda at the same time as My Name is Asher Lev, it occurred to me that the story of the latter is actually subsumed into a single chapter of the former. When Daniel finally meets the mother...
Festivals in poetry: Menorah
A journey of transformation
God Sleeps in Rwanda: a journey of transformation by Joseph Sebarenzi with Laura Ann Mullane. Atria Books. ISBN: 978 141657 573 3. £18.99. The European subjection and colonisation of Africa has left a brutal legacy. From the indefensible abuses of enslavement and apartheid to the wanton plundering of Africa’s rich resources, it is...
Of truth, teacups and wineglasses
The first programme of his BBC television series on the history of Christianity (5 and 8 November) showed professor Diarmuid McCulloch pouring oil into a glass of water and a few minutes later adding red wine to water in another glass. He was presenting the difference between two fifth century Christian theologians’...
Child of Light
Anyone who was in Bull Street Meeting House, Birmingham on Saturday 24 October – and around forty of us were – had another musical treat from The Leaveners. A choir of some twenty-four people, all ages and backgrounds, had gathered at 10am that morning and worked hard with John Sheldon, accompanist, learning the...