Reviews Articles
The Quaker way
Most of those who become Quakers today will have made a spiritual journey to arrive at this destination. We are now a Society of convinced Friends rather than cradle Quakers. Many daughters and sons of Friends continue their parents’ questing and move beyond the Society, even if holding to Quaker...
Watford’s Quiet Heroes
On 15 June 1916 Howard Marten was led from a prison cell in Boulogne to stand in front of thousands of soldiers on a parade ground. Howard, a thirty-one-year-old Quaker from the Watford area, then heard an officer declare that he had been found guilty of disobeying an order while on active...
Living eldership
Elders are the arteries through which the spiritual life of the Yearly Meeting flows. Long neglected, they have, I believe, become hardened and thus restrict the flow of life. When Alastair Heron was clerk to Yearly Meeting elders he used his position to lead a group to clarify and publish...
For God’s Sake
It is surprising what a male enterprise the current debate between theism and atheism is. The atheists, Jack Smart, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, AC Grayling, attract as opponents male heavyweights like John Haldane, Antony Flew, David Bentley Hart, and Deepak Chopra. As in other male preserves, the debate takes on...
Open for transformation: Being Quaker
Open For Transformation: Being Quaker is, for me, one of the most important and timely Swarthmore Lectures for a long time. I write from the perspective of one of the majority of British Friends who was not at Bath to hear the lecture by Ben Pink Dandelion at first hand....
Quakers remembered
A unique piece of community theatre, Quakers in the first world war: A commemoration, was given two performances on Saturday 13 September at Jordans Meeting House in Buckinghamshire. The performances coincided with the one hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), whose first training camp was at...
Progressive Friends
Last year I spent three months at Pendle Hill near Philadelphia. One of the things that made that time special was encountering Chuck Fager, who was there undertaking research into a branch of American Quakerism called Progressive Friends. Chuck is known as a prolific, if sometimes controversial, writer on a...
Fraudcast News
Press corruption is, sadly, a subject we’re now familiar with, from the press’s own coverage of the Leveson Inquiry and, more recently, the trial of Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and others who – in what might become the longest criminal trial in English history – are charged with phone hacking...
Dear George…
The testimony written after his death in 1982 starts: ‘George Gorman was one of the few members of London Yearly Meeting who was known in every Monthly Meeting and possibly in every Preparative Meeting; he was also known to a great many Friends in Yearly Meetings of continental Europe and of...
Only a Signal Shown
Garnishing a love story and the lives of the characters within it with some personal experiences, Leela Dutt’s Only a Signal Shown is an enjoyable, emotional journey. This journey starts with a burnt marmalade-basted chicken. Eleanor and Alec share the results of his limited cooking skills and both...