In the opening worship on the Saturday morning of Yearly Meeting I was more than a little disturbed to hear a Friend in ministry assert, with apparent pride, that ‘As Quakers we…
Last year more than 3,000 babies, children, women and men were drowned in the Mediterranean, having set out from North Africa in unseaworthy ships operated by pirates in a…
A central Quaker tenet is the divinity in all humans, that ‘we are all children of God’. This has implications for how we want people to be treated and what we do. Sometimes…
Recently in Uganda I mediated a dispute between a wife and her husband. They were poor smallholders and he was a deacon in the church. One of their three goats was killed by a…
Money must be important to us since we have so many words for it. There’s loot, buck, dime, quid, dough, bread, dosh, cash, readies, lolly, lucre, moolah, wonga, bob, tanner and…
Everybody is a prisoner of time. We cannot avoid the inevitability of mortality. Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’ (As You Like It) elegantly explains how our lives change.…
It was an extraordinary week in Ireland. First, we had the visit of prince Charles and Camilla. Their friendly visit to the West of Ireland and, especially, to Mullaghmore, where…
Between 1414-18, in the midst of wars over three rival claimants to the papacy, the Council of Constance brought together European religious and secular leaders for protracted…
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