Reviews Articles
Springsteen on Broadway
‘What canst thou say… what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?’ If George Fox put this question to Bruce Springsteen, he would say ‘I took my fun very seriously, it is my service, it is my long and noisy prayer’. In this stage show he tells this story, interspersed...
Caroline, or Change
The first thing to reach you is Sharon D Clarke’s voice. In a slow moving first number her rich, emotion-laced singing keeps you watching. She plays Caroline, a domestic worker in 1963 Louisiana, the year John F Kennedy is shot. Working in a hot, stuffy basement for a liberal white...
The Sacred Art of Joking, by James Cary
At the Greenbelt Festival last year, I wrote and performed ‘Spot the Quaker’. Billed as ‘a cross between stand-up comedy and a history lecture’, I was commissioned to make people laugh while informing them about who Quakers really are. The thinking was that a Quaker doing stand-up is a good...
Ni Sisi
A man tears around the rickety stage in agony screaming: ‘Knifed! I’ve been knifed!’ Three brightly dressed, buxom ladies go to inspect his injuries. By now, he is prone on the floor and they turn him over and pronounce their verdict: ‘A bee sting!’
Testimonies and jigsaws
In his engaging new book, Quaker Roots and Branches, John Lampen continues his valuable dual mission to get his fellow Quakers to take their history seriously and to remind non-Quakers that we are still going strong today.
Heaven on Earth
During the 1990s, three Woodbrooke tutors engaged in a sustained and fruitful dialogue based on their respective areas of research and teaching. This resulted, initially, in a course, and subsequently in a book, Heaven on Earth: Quakers and the Second Coming, published in 1998. The book has just been republished to...
Waiting for the last bus
In Richard Holloway’s book A Little History of Religion, in a chapter called ‘Friends’, he calls George Fox ‘one of the most attractive figures in the history of religion’ and concludes by saying that: ‘The Society of Friends may be one of the smallest denominations in the world but...
Glimpses of Eden
Jonathan Tulloch will be known to many, not only for his novels, which have been serialised on BBC Radio 4, but also for the series of gentle, thought-provoking passages he writes regularly in the ‘Nature Notebook’ in The Times and, probably more amongst Catholics, in The Tablet. Glimpses of Eden: Field...
A study of tribunals
Britain was the first country to include the right to claim conscientious objection as a reason for exemption from military service. The Military Service Act of 1916 brought in conscription for the first time in Britain, to make up for the heavy losses of military lives in the first eighteen months...
Poacher’s pilgrimage
Alastair McIntosh, a Scottish Quaker, writer, broadcaster and activist, records, in Poacher’s Pilgrimage, a twelve-day trek from the bottom of the Isle of Harris to the top of Lewis in the Hebrides.