Reith Lectures
I am listening to the Reith Lectures 2024, whose subject this year is ‘Violence’. There has been a fascinating discussion on whether a person can be ‘an evil person’.
The lecturer has referred to the importance of education in emotional conflict, which occurs in a wide range of normal life circumstances. This has reminded me of how the Society of Friends has, in the past, helped our young people to understand and work on ‘conflict resolution’.
LEAP Confronting Conflict was the instigator of this way of working. I wonder if we still have the opportunity to offer this today. I have referred to this in my book for teenagers George and the Flying Foxes reviewed in the Friend 5 July and available from the Quaker Bookshop.
Sometimes serving prisoners have been in the audience of these lectures and one of the talks is taking place at Grendon Prison.
I commend them to Friends.
Christine Hayes
The Lord’s Prayer
The Lord’s Prayer (see letters 6 & 13 December) would have to be translated into Aramaic from one of the various (and varying) late first- or early second-century Greek sources before it could then be translated into English. How does that help?
And anyway, isn’t the traditional Quaker view that Jesus instructed his followers to pray in that fashion: familiar, conversational, about forgiveness and hope, rather than in his exact words. Whatever they were.
Keith Braithwaite
