4th December 2015

Facing the challenge

by Quaker groups

As Quakers, we are called to work for the peaceable Kingdom of God on the whole Earth, in right sharing with all peoples. We recognize a moral duty to cherish Creation for future…

4th December 2015

Knowing ourselves

by Abigail Maxwell

I need to spend time with my kind. For a day together we came from Edinburgh and London to Manchester. The gathering was organised by the QLGF, the Quaker LGBT+ Fellowship. We seek…

4th December 2015

Gleanings: Being a transformational community

by Laurie Michaelis

I am a natural hermit. Of the last forty-two years, I’ve shared a home for only twelve. I thrive on solitude and have developed a peculiar low-input lifestyle that few people…

27th November 2015

Thought for the Week: Books

by Ian Kirk-Smith

This issue of the Friend is devoted to words, writing and books. Quakers, since the seventeenth century, have had a very close association with the written word. Books, despite a…

27th November 2015

Tales of the China Convoy

by The Friend

The inspiring story of how the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) ‘China Convoy’ brought medical and relief supplies to a devastated China in the dark years of the 1940s is told in A…

20th November 2015

Positive money

by Sue Holden
20th November 2015

Thought for the Week: The other

by Ian Kirk-Smith

David Bleakley’s father worked in the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast and once put rivets into the hull of the Titanic. His son followed in his footsteps and did an…

20th November 2015

A living wage

by Alan Sealy

At a meeting held in London on 2 November Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, announced the new London rate for the Citizens UK Living Wage. It is £9.40 an hour – up from…

20th November 2015

From the archive: …in a broken world

by Janet Scott

Towards the end of 1915 news began to filter through to Britain of terrible massacres in Armenia. The Friend recorded a disturbing statistic on 15 October: In the House of Lords,…

20th November 2015

Surrendering to the Light

by Shanthini Cawson

It is sometimes hard to imagine that eighteen years ago we were making our way from Canada to the UK looking for a more peaceful, meaningful way of life and ended up being wardens…

13th November 2015

Thought for the Week: Acceptance and hope

by A prisoner at HMP Full Sutton

As a prisoner with an indefinite sentence, I came to prison with a lack of direction, little to aspire to in the way of positive role models, and a pro-criminal attitude that I had…

13th November 2015

Prison reform

by Juliet Lyon

Prison is a place where people are sent as a punishment, not for further punishments… Human beings whose lives have been reckoned so far in costs – to society, to the criminal…