Issue 12-11-2021
Featured story
Brace your self: Kate McNally’s Thought for the Week
To be loved just as we are is a gift. To be worthy of this gift assumes that we strive to be our best selves. Being our best selves requires that we acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses – further, that we explore the ways in which they relate to each other....
Top stories
Quakers gather for COP26 climate march
Hundreds of Quakers marked the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice this week, with significant marches in Glasgow, London, Leeds and Manchester.
Down to earth: Thinking post-COP26 by Frank Regan
Many of us remember being stunned and delighted when we saw the first colour photographs of Earth from outer space. There it was, a blue-green amethyst, floating serenely on a dark galactic ocean within a Milky Way (with an estimated visible diameter of 100,000-200,000 light-years). We could see only one...
Body building: Chris Skidmore celebrates the work of Quaker architects
I have been thinking a lot, during the pandemic, about our Quaker-built heritage. What does it tell us of the Quaker past, and what lessons can we learn from it? This might be a deeply suspect thing to do, at a time when the Yearly Meeting epistle refers to ‘possessions...
Labour pains: Elizabeth Coleman on a universal basic income
‘Try to discern new grouping points in social and economic life’ (Advices & queries 33). When I was a student in the late sixties, we learned to anticipate the ‘problem of leisure’. Production would become more and more automated, and so fewer and fewer workers would be needed. In 1953, Ford in...
Life before death: Matthew Callow on caring for struggling Friends
Once, at an Anglican Evensong in my teenage years, I was idly flicking through the Book of Common Prayer. I noticed that at the beginning of the ‘Order for the Burial of the Dead’ it said that this rite should not be used for those who have ‘laid violent hands...
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Timmon Wallis leaves QCEA in controversial departure
Timmon Wallis, the new director of Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA), has left his post before completing the probationary period.
BBC allows presenters to wear white poppies
The BBC has confirmed that its presenters can wear white poppies on television in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday. Presenters may wear remembrance poppies ‘of any colour’ between Saturday 30 October and Sunday 14 November.
New Hammersmith Meeting House wins award
The new Hammersmith Meeting House has won an award celebrating it as ‘a special jewel’.
Research into Edinburgh Meeting House ‘hauntings’
A writer who is researching paranormal activity is interested in Central Edinburgh Meeting House because of its alleged association with the Scottish soldier Thomas Weir. The seventeenth-century presumed occultist was executed in 1670 for bestiality, incest and adultery.
Digging deep: Marilyn Biles on the new garden at Warwick Meeting
‘Our Meeting houses… deserve our care, attention and imaginative thought, so that they may be attractive both to ourselves and to others, whilst remaining faithful to our commitment to simplicity, care of the environment and equality’ (Quaker faith & practice 14.25).
Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve
I came across Frank Herbert’s novel Dune as a student in the mid 1970s. Like many back then, I was looking for an epic world of fantasy and adventure as a ‘next read’ after exhausting all the works of JRR Tolkien. The film in cinemas now is the latest...
Letters - 12 November 2021
Christian atheism? I was struck by Abigail Maxwell’s thoughtful article ‘Honest to God’ in the 3 September Friend. I wanted to say at the end: ‘You are not far from the Kingdom of God.’ Yes, we are people of the Way; yes, the Bible is a collection of all sorts...