This year we’re beginning to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war. I was once asked by a national newspaper whether Quakers were pacifists as quite a…
More than two hundred people from twenty-seven countries attended the recent conference ‘Why War?’ in celebration of forty years of Peace Studies at Bradford University. In…
It has been said many times in the Friend (often by self-identified nontheists) that the way to deal with ‘the nontheism question’ is to engage with it, and that is why I…
Everyone knows what Quakers did in the 1914-18 war. Inspired by their historic Peace Testimony they were united in opposing it. While soldiers joined up to kill the enemy, Quakers…
In the light of recent discussions I find myself perplexed: am I a theist or a nontheist? It all depends on what you mean by ‘_ist’. I take an _ist to be someone who has come…
Jan Sellers of Wansteaad Meeting, London, is speaking on BBC Radio 4’s programme Something Understood on Sunday 18 May at 6.05am and then repeated at 11.30pm.
Two stories of violence are dominating the news, the kidnapping of girls in Northern Nigeria and the unrest in Ukraine. It is natural for Friends to find such events disturbing,…
On Sunday 2 August 1914 Britain saw the country’s biggest ever anti-war demonstration (before 2003): fifteen thousand people in Trafalgar Square led by Keir Hardie, fifty…
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