The need for stories
It couldn’t be more urgent. It couldn’t be more critical to the survival of humanity and many other species on the face of the earth. We’ve been talking about our commitment to this for decades. Lis Burch, our clerk, reminded us of 2011 when, at the Canterbury Britain...
Being there
What a positive event! I had anticipated that a gathering on sustainability and climate change might be really depressing. Previous Quaker and Transition Town events had dragged me down with doom and gloom; but, unexpectedly, this one left me feeling really excited and ready to go.
Petals and bullets
The book Petals and Bullets: Dorothy Morris - New Zealand Nurse in the Spanish Civil War by Mark Derby is a well-written and absorbing story. It is based mainly on eighty personal and evocative letters written by Dorothy Morris to her family in New Zealand between 1937 and 1946. In these years...
Eye - 15 April 2016
Being unkind to Quakers Could being nasty to Quakers be a way of improving the country’s prospects? This unusual strategy caught the attention of Judith Mason, of Banbury Meeting, whilst she was reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling. During his travels in Shropshire Bill Bryson paid...
A Field of Wheat
A Field of Wheat is based in Lincolnshire and takes an imaginative approach to raising issues of concern about the land today and, in particular, the challenge of climate change. The idea behind the project comes from a shared curiosity about what it would feel like to be in and...
Thought for the Week: The abacus
It was the first time that I had to open the Meeting house to our Newbury Friends on a Sunday morning. I was chuffed. What a privilege! I had the keys, got some milk, three balls of vibrantly yellow chrysanthemums – ready to go. Carolyn said the flowers were meant to...
Meeting for Sufferings: Risks and logos
Some of the risks now faced by the Religious Society of Friends in Britain were highlighted at Meeting for Sufferings held at Friends House, London, on Saturday 2 April. Ingrid Greenhow, clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) trustees, spoke to the minutes of the February 2016 trustees’ meeting. BYM treasurer Peter Ullathorne...
Meeting for Sufferings: Living out our faith
Britain Yearly Meeting is moving through a three-year arc, ‘Living out our faith’, Meeting for Sufferings clerk Ethel Livermore explained in the papers. At Yearly Meeting 2015, Sufferings was asked ‘to take the work on social injustice forward, coordinating the work of Local and Area Meetings [AMs] who might wish to...
Meeting for Sufferings: Minutes from Meetings
A number of minutes from Area Meetings were brought to Sufferings. A concern over the use of the phrase ‘Quakers in Britain’ came from Cambridgeshire Area Meeting. A response from recording clerk Paul Parker was included in the papers for Meeting for Sufferings, and the minute was forwarded to Britain...
Meeting for Sufferings: QWRC renewed
Anne Bennett, clerk of the Quaker World Relations Committee (QWRC), spoke to its first annual report.