Reviews Articles
Good Ground Beneath My Feet: Poems from Iona, by Martin Hayden
The Quaker poet Martin Hayden won’t mind me saying that he reminds me of the ‘old men’ in TS Eliot’s ‘East Coker’: ‘Old men ought to be explorers | Here or there does not matter | We must be still and still moving | Into another intensity’. He’s on the...
Difficult Questions About Population, by Roger Plenty and other Quakers
Quaker Concern Over Population (QCOP) was formed in 2015 and granted Quaker Recognised Body status in 2018. Its aim is to remind Friends of the danger of population growth and to explore the means by which it can be addressed without coercion. The group hopes to encourage Friends to overcome their reticence...
The Plots Against Hitler, by Danny Orbach
When people learn that Quakers are pacifist, they commonly ask what we would have done about Adolf Hitler, by which they mean, how would we have resisted him? It is instructive therefore, to find out how people living in Hitler’s regime did it. Such a question is given additional...
Animal Prayers, by Randel McCraw Helms
This little book will delight Friends of all stripes and is calculated to appeal especially to those who care about the relationship between humans and other animals. The poems radiate a sense of kinship with other species, along with sorrow for our trespasses against them. Some have an autobiographical flavour,...
The Godless Gospel: Was Jesus a great moral teacher?, by Julian Baggini
I found this a very stimulating book. It asks whether Jesus was ‘a great moral teacher’, as Richard Dawkins has called him, and whether his ethics are still valid for us if we remove all the divine and supernatural elements. You may think this is rather a narrow, even irrelevant,...
Quakerism: The basics, by Margery Post Abbott and Carl Abbott
This is a considerable achievement: a book that balances size, scope, readability and rigour to produce something short, yet with a wide range of material. It is also easy to read while retaining accuracy and original sources. Published by Routledge as part of ‘The Basics’ series, it comes into a...
Samplers, Sewing & Simplicity in Quaker Ireland, by Clodagh Grubb
This beautifully illustrated, A4-size book is packed with information. It relates to the story of Ireland, the development of education there, and Irish women’s history, together with expert and comprehensive chapters on clothing and costume, household linen and soft furnishing. But the main focus, and final chapter, is...
Entangled Life by Melvin Sheldrake
In this book Merlin Sheldrake shows a fine writing style, making a complex area not only understandable, but life-changingly fascinating. Entangled Life – to whose, or maybe to which, life does he refer? You may not find many answers, but will almost certainly arrive at some intriguing questions. The book reaches...
Let us Dream: The path to a brighter future, by Francis, the pope
New Year encourages us to speculate on our future. In this book, Francis surveys the crises around us: the pandemic, the climate, and also the longstanding problems of inequality, of war and its casualties (think Yemen). Francis sees these in biblical terms, as a ‘sifting’, a time when our usual...
Joe Biden: American Dreamer, by Evan Osnos
Joe Biden was born in 1942. Evan Osnos says in this worthy biography that ‘He was a product of the Silent Generation, the cohort of Cautious Americans born between the Great Depression and the end of world war two’. He was true to type. He was to be a cautious politician,...