Reviews Articles
Sam Peel
It is exciting to come across a new book that tells a remarkable story of a Quaker life. Sam Peel: A man who did different is a biography written by his granddaughter, Susan Wild, and was recently published by the Wells Local History Group. Sam was born in Stapleford, Hertfordshire,...
Journey into life
Of all Christian traditions, Quakers are most committed to a mystical understanding of religion. They share this understanding with the Carthusians and Cistercians, and with the mystics of the Church. This explains why George Fox felt such affinity with the sixteenth-century Lutheran mystic Jakob Boehme. It is also why our...
Lover of souls
The love I bear to the souls of all men makes me willing to undergo whatever can be inflicted on me – Elizabeth Hooton Elizabeth Hooton’s words came to life for me on 21 June in Rugby Meeting House. Lynn Morris’s one woman show, Lover of Souls, opened with...
Endings and beginnings
While visiting Cape Town recently, I was shaken by an inequality that made it hard to relax. Townships with savage poverty exist as ghettos a few miles away from the most expensive real estate in Africa. In the modest flat where we stayed there were three lines of security. A...
The Last Runaway
This quietly remarkable novel teaches us a good deal about mid-nineteenth century American Quakers. In doing so, it has confirmed and enlightened for me what it means to be a Quaker in early twenty-first century Britain.
Lincoln and leadership
Abraham Lincoln had many qualities a Quaker would want in a leader: clear vision of what he sought to achieve based on ethical principles, combined with a sensitive and compassionate approach to the people he met. These qualities came out strongly in the recently released Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln, which...
Living our discernment
In A Small Share in History: A Quaker initiative in Eastern Europe Diana and John Lampen describe a Quaker initiative – visiting Belarus and Ukraine between 1991 and 2004 (at the time these countries were emerging from the Soviet Union) – sharing methods of creative conflict handling in schools and inter-active classroom approaches; and...
Peace and conflict
It wasn’t the Odeon, Leicester Square – no red carpet, no ‘A listers’, no paparazzi, no designer gowns – but it was the world premiere of Tony Britten’s (no relation) new film about the development of Benjamin Britten’s pacifist convictions while a pupil at Gresham’s School, Holt in...
The failure of success
Is your attitude to life sharply contrasted between white and black – success or failure? If it is, you may find this slim volume helpful and heart-warming. If it isn’t – rejoice in being blessed with contentment. Jennifer Kavanagh, in her new book The Failure of Success, is deeply concerned...
Tripping the light fantastic
‘Light’, wrote Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth century, ‘is more exalted and of a nobler and more excellent essence than all corporeal things.’ From the ancient to the early modern world, it was a commonplace that light offered the best way of representing the unrepresentable, namely God. As recently as...