Reviews Articles
Quaker Shaped Christianity: How the Jesus story and the Quaker way fit together, by Mark Russ
All Quaker-shaped human beings should read Mark Russ’s book, please. Its title is intended to appeal, it seems, to Christians who are not Quakers and want to know why Quakerism has to be a thing at all. But it also serves to remind Christianity-phobic Friends that the ‘forgetting of...
A Simple Faith in a Complicated World: One Quaker’s journey through doubt to faith, by Kate McNally
This book is an introduction to the Quaker way. Most of these are written by convinced Friends trying to make sense of this convincement. The usual dilemmas must be faced: the Quaker way is experiential, so each journey is personal and unique. The language used by Friends is tentative. The...
The Atheist’s Guide to Quaker Process: Spirit-led decisions for the secular, by Selden W Smith
Pendle Hill Quaker Center has a long tradition of publishing Quaker pamphlets that challenge, inform and inspire. This one, number 472, ticks all three boxes. Its target readership is the growing number of non-Quaker nontheists who are employed by Quaker organisations: the men and women recruited partly because there aren’t...
Children of the Stone City, by Beverley Naidoo
Two young siblings use music to resist the authorities, who mistreat and oppress them. Little sister Leila plays Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on her flute, to let her brother know his family is in the overcrowded military court. There, handcuffed and shackled, he’s being led off to solitary...
Reconsidering Reparations, by Olúfẹmi O Táíwò
Olúfémi Táíwò is an academic philosopher who works in the intersection of climate justice and colonialism. This book has helped me better understand some of the issues.
The Doctor, by Robert Icke (Duke of York’s Theatre, London)
This brilliant play exposed some of my worst fears about the future of human beings. The story turns round a well-known, highly successful doctor trying to save the life of a fourteen-year-old, who has contracted sepsis after a failed, self-administered abortion.
How to be a Refugee: Life lessons by one who escaped the Holocaust, by Irene Gabriele Gill
Oxford Friend Irene Gill has written a truly remarkable book about the first eighty-nine years of her life. It begins with how she, her parents and siblings arrived in Oxford in 1939. Both parents were part Jewish, and needed to escape from Germany. Her father found employment at the university.
Friends and Comrades: How Quakers helped Russians survive famine and epidemic, by Sergei Nikitin
A century ago, British and US Quakers were amid the turmoil of the revolution in Russia, providing help to starving people. Today there is again strife and war in Europe. Sergei Nikitin’s book, translated by Suzanne Eades-Roberts, comes at a useful time.
The Boy at the Back of the Class, by Onjali Q Rauf
I thought this was a really good book. It made me think a lot about refugees and how badly they are treated here in this country.
All Ways Walk Cheerfully, by Peter Schweiger
Life is a patchwork of happenings, some planned for, many disjointed, and countless repetitive. The richer the incidents that make up these happenings, the richer the patchwork, and this book unpacks a fascinating and busy life in a refreshingly honest style – at times planned, at times disjointed, at times repetitive,...