Arts 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...
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;
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...
Meeting at Glenthorne
We met in silence, the cows and I in the long wet grass, in worship they, ruminating I. They sat. I stood by the wooden fence that set apart the sprawling house from the winding path that climbed in awe to the passing clouds. Again I saw the hill I...
The spirit of creation
The National Gallery, in London’s Trafalgar Square, contains some of the finest paintings in the world. They are an enduring expression of the very best in humanity – especially of that need within the human spirit to create and celebrate.
The inferior sex?
Mary Wollstonecraft, an eighteenth century dissenter and staunch pioneer of women’s liberation, fought against the exploitation and subordination of women by men. In 1792 she published her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It was not a well-received work, and many people at the time thought her book...