8th July 2016

Thought for the Week: Isms and ists

by Martin Pennock

A year or so ago our Local Meeting introduced name labels for members and regular attenders. Like some other Friends, I felt a resistance to the idea but have begun to feel more…

8th July 2016

Drugs: a life of their own

by Nicholas McGeorge

My interest in illegal drugs policy began when I went to work as a psychologist in the English prison service in 1974. Other influences have been meeting with Bolivian Quakers…

8th July 2016

From here to where?

by Diana Sandy

A Friend recently wrote, in a book review of A Man that Looks on Glass by Derek Guiton, that ‘The Society of Friends is in crisis’. Is it … and in what way? A few years ago…

8th July 2016

The Friends of God


by Bill Bingham
1st July 2016

A helping hand

by Suzanne (Jill) Bennett

Suzanne (Jill) Bennett is fifty-seven and a member of Sidmouth Meeting. She took off to travel through South America on her own earlier this year with the intention of making her…

1st July 2016

Thought for the Week: Good neighbours

by Ian Kirk-Smith

The result of the referendum has highlighted a difference between ‘direct democracy’ and ‘representational democracy’. More than seventeen million voted to leave the EU. No…

1st July 2016

Return to Calais

by Anne M Jones

‘Have conditions in “the Jungle” improved since you were there in January?’ asked my son, to which I replied: ‘Just as one gets used to the sight of snails in an English…

1st July 2016

Road blocks

by Ian Beeson
1st July 2016

Quaker renewal: A shared language

by Craig Barnett

One of the ways that contemporary Quaker practice has become impoverished is by the loss of a shared spiritual language. Instead of a common vocabulary for sharing our experiences…

24th June 2016

Thought for the Week: Lost in translation

by John Lampen

I sometimes hear Friends substituting ‘that of good in everyone’ for George Fox’s words ‘that of God’. Both ‘good’ and ‘God’ have such wide connotations that they…

24th June 2016

Europe: A healing space

by Oliver Robertson

The one thing we can say with certainty about the EU referendum is that there will be a lot of unhappy people waking up on 24 June. It may be that one of the most helpful things…

24th June 2016

The Welcome Project

by Terry Winterton

Oxford University Press recently announced ‘Refugee’ as the ‘Children’s Word of the Year’ for 2016. They chose it because so many children had been using the word in…