Issue 10-12-2021
Featured story
Losing weight: Kate McNally’s Thought for the Week
When I was new to Quakers, I thought a ‘weighty Quaker’ was something to aspire to. It seemed to convey the idea of someone who witnessed to Truth – someone who practiced our values thoroughly.
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Friends urge ‘Close the Barracks’
Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) is urging Friends to support a campaign calling for the government not to house refugees in disused army barracks.
The locked-down anchoress: Beth Allen on Julian of Norwich
In these last two years many of us have lived shut away, enclosed in a few rooms, unable to go out because we are vulnerable to Covid infection. I haven’t been able to get to the library, so instead I’ve been re-reading the books I already have. This...
Solving a dilemma: Plato for Quakers, by Philip Waywell
Christian theology is peppered with Plato, and so is the Quaker way. Our belief in that of God in every person – and our practice of attentive stillness – is inescapably neoplatonic.
Identity crises: Paul Hodgkin rewrites more sacred texts
Climate breakdown calls us to new ways of living. The Light calls us to simultaneously stand in awe of the sunset and to understand how the great Earth cycles of water, energy and carbon intertwine in that same sunset. To face an unstable climate we need to know both the...
Innocent ground
How then to be anything but hard smooth and stone faced (practised, all set?) when the sower comes; anything but too deeply trodden, churned – by the endless roil of thoughts past, future, or never – to make her welcome, to offer him a fit place?
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Quaker heads gather at Friends House
Quakers in Britain have invited the heads of Quaker agencies to a blended gathering this week to build connections and strengthen Quaker unity around the world.
Young Quaker rallies for youth climate strikers
A Young Quaker has urged Friends to continue supporting student climate strikers in their action this week. Adam Waters from Selly Oak Meeting urged those present at the ‘Action not Words – what can Birmingham do after the Climate Conference?’ to get behind the protestors who will be taking to the...
Successful hearing for Brighton Meeting
Brighton Meeting has had its concerns met regarding a license for a restaurant next door to its Meeting house.
More redundancies at Friends House
There were more job losses at Friends House last month as Quakers continue their financial restructuring and shift to more local working. Anne van Staveren, media relations officer, and Adam Bambury, communications manager, recently took redundancy and left. Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) is now recruiting for a media officer, video...
‘Quaker Conversation’ considers impact of online Quakerism
Friends debated the impact of the shift to online Quakerism last weekend in the latest of Friends World Committee for Consultation’s (FWCC) ‘Quaker Conversation’ series.
Meeting for Sufferings: Online again
Saturday 4 December, morning session Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) was online-only again for its December session, after having experimented in October with a ‘blended’ mix of Zoom and in-person gathering. The experiment had been successful, but the pandemic logistics are complicated, and this time it was just the clerks who met...
Meeting for Sufferings: Book of Discipline Revision Committee
The day would mostly be spent hearing reports from various groups, the first of which was from the Book of Discipline Revision Committee (BDRC). Clerk Margaret Bryan reminded Friends that it was MfS’s reponsibility to ensure that matters were proceeding well: that any outputs were consistent and coherent, and...
Meeting for Sufferings: Quaker World Relations Committee
Tracey Martin, clerk of Quaker World Relations Committee (QWRC) introduced the committee’s annual report. QWRC’s remit had taken a different shape this year, she said, with a greater number of online events. But it was still a ‘great joy’ to be part of the ‘ecosystem’ of Friends’ relationships...
Meeting for Sufferings: Quaker Committee for Christian and Interfaith Relations
Representatives had already read reports offered from Yearly Meetings around Europe, and expressed interest and gratuitude in response. It was a shame that no one had been able to attend Norway’s gathering, but a last-minute hitch in translation services made it impossible. Overall it was good to be ‘reminded...
We Are All From Somewhere Else: Migration and survival in poetry and prose, by Ruth Padel
Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet who teaches at Kings College, London. She is also a traveller who spent time when writing this book at the migrant camp on Lesbos. Here, she writes in both prose and poetry: each section begins with a prose description, which is followed by poems...
Letters - 10 December 2021
QCEA and dismissal Rebecca Hardy’s report (26 November) on the Quaker Council for European Affairs’ (QCEA) dismissal of its general secretary, Timmon Wallis, raises some very disturbing issues. Rebecca quotes Jeremy Lester, clerk of QCEA’s Executive Committee, that the decision to dismiss Wallis was ‘taken rightfully’, but ‘there were...