Reviews Articles
Refraction: Moving images on Palestine
The uneven relationship between Israel and Palestine is the theme for a powerful exhibition at a superb new gallery space, the P21 Gallery, just off London’s Euston Road, near Friends House. Refraction: Moving images on Palestine is art that attempts to come to terms with what is, for some,...
Cause for concern
It may seem strange to review a slim paperback by a Quaker published forty-two years ago, but Herbert Dobbing, for nine years head of Brummana High School, was a far-sighted and reflective commentator, not only as a skilled summariser of the broader history of Palestine, but for his insights into...
The Nayler Passion
‘There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end.’ These words of James Nayler are amongst the best loved in Quaker literature, and form the...
A very Quaker Jesus
Noel Moules has written his new book with several purposes in mind. In Fingerprints of Fire, Footprints of Peace: A spiritual manifesto from a Jesus perspective, he writes for anyone wanting to explore fresh possibilities, for those who are seeking and for those who are just looking for common ground...
What if?
Linda Hoy is a well-known children’s novelist – one of her books is a set text in schools – and a Friend. She is also an explorer who has presented us with a book – The Effect: Where science meets spirituality – that I can only describe as warm-hearted, imaginative, a mine of...
Dying to live
Being familiar with the gospels can lead us into thinking that we know Jesus and his teaching very well. Then, when you read a book by a writer who has steeped himself in the text, and the context in which the author was writing, new perspectives dawn. John Churcher is...
Staying true
Lynn Waddington was a Huckleberry child. Her river was the Delaware, idling through South Jersey, shared with brother and sister and swimming muskrats. A child in a natural world, she wrote, ‘can hear the footsteps of beetles far away.’ The family home sat without neighbours for many years until the...
Presence in the midst
The picture ‘The presence in the midst’ is one that I have seen in many Meeting houses. It depicts a deeply gathered Quaker Meeting of former years, with the genders segregated, and the filmy figure of Jesus as the otherwise unseen presence.
Wisdom
Is there any real place for wisdom in our frenetic, postmodern, quasi-apocalyptic, multi-tasking, dual- income, economically challenging world? This is one of the questions Stephen S Hall asks in Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. He maintains that among ordinary people there is a hunger for any excuse to raise their...
Religion for atheists
I looked forward to this book, hoping it might speak to those looking for a faith with no taint of dogma or superstition; wisdom without doctrine, as the author calls it.