Culture Articles
Vantage point
If I need a better life, I build one, dig its foundations below the soles of my feet, plough the potholes with the heels of my shoes and, into the arms of a good neighbour, entrust my...
Jesus As Witnessed By the Disciple He Loved: A commentary on the gospel of John, by Alan Asay
The gospel of John has often been called the ‘Quaker gospel’, mainly, perhaps, because of its many references to light, which chime with much Quaker theological conversation today. Early Quakers were greatly inspired by this gospel, and it gives each new generation of Friends much food for thought. Alan Asay,...
Worship
We lost a Friend this week. He died just round the bay where the estuary meets the sea. A sweet day for us today surfing, sunshine and Meeting – it’s all worship, isn’t it?
Spell God
I write it in the dirt today in the bottom of the grave where New Year’s worms ease in the writhe or relent of human hate.
The Dictionary People, by Sarah Ogilvie
Friends love wordless silence, of course, but some of us love words too, written or spoken. This book is the latest in a line of fascinating works about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Darling, save the last dance for me
Not a neat map with a route-proofreading of sorrows. We find ourselves inherently happy. Your twitch to my itch, my blistered kissed lips and your sculptured jaw-line moving prime numbers into play. We approach a kinda Dhammapada climbed neither high nor higher. To that far place where no sun shines, ...
Consciousness Beyond Life: The science of the near-death experience, by Pim van Lommel
This book is much more than its subtitle. When I wrote a simple thank-you to its author, he sent me an article that ends with this extraordinary statement: ‘Consciousness seems to be our essence, and once we leave our body, leave our physical world, we exist as pure consciousness, beyond...
Marion Fay by Anthony Trollope
Lovers of Anthony Trollope’s novels generally admire his skill in depicting the lives and feelings of young women. But you may not know that one of his last heroines is a Friend. Trollope did not always have a high opinion of Quakers, once writing of our ‘low character for...
The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
The Good Soldier (1915) is routinely included in lists of the best novels written in English. John Dowell, its narrator, is a Quaker from an old Pennsylvania family. He is one of those unreliable narrators, far from disinterested. He is one of the four main characters in the novel – the quartet...
What the skeleton said
When alive I was male. My hips have Told you this. A warrior, a soldier. You need only see my shin, dented, Axe-marked, the whole leg mis-shapen While still in my teens. Fighting was harsh, and weapons primitive. My hands, when they held blood, damaged by war, My skin burned,...