Issue 18-02-2022
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Keith Denerley on elective procedures
An article in the Friend last autumn made me sit up. It was musing on the prophesy of the last days in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus teaches there that the time is shortened ‘because of the elect’. The chosen ones. Does that mean me? You?
Top stories
Anti-frackers welcome Lancashire site shutdown
Quaker anti-fracking campaigners have welcomed a decision to plug and abandon a controversial Lancashire fracking site.
On the record, part two: Paul Parker, interviewed by Joseph Jones
At the end of the last conversation we were talking about how gathered your Meetings with BYM trustees were, and how to get Friends to trust decisions that were made there. The Friend attends Meeting for Sufferings to help with communications. What if we attended trustee Meetings, too? BYM trustees...
Think again, Priti
Priti Patel, Priti Patel your Police and Crime Bill will take us to hell, draconian powers never end well – for pity’s sake, Priti, we have to rebel!
Play favourites: John Lampen revisits Shakespeare’s Henry VI
Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy was a big success in its time, but is seldom played today. The plays look boring on paper. Huge lists of characters have names that sound like county councils; long speeches are given in plodding end-stopped verse; indistinguishable battles recur. But past productions have shown...
Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the wisdom and intelligence of the forest, by Suzanne Simard
Of the forty-odd books I read last year, by far the most inspiring – and the one I most wanted to urge other Quakers to read –was Finding the Mother Tree
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Friends urged to lobby on health bill
Quakers are being urged to write to their MPs about the new Health and Care Bill.
The Retreat commits to public consultation
The Quaker-founded mental health institute The Retreat, York, has agreed a formal contract on the sale of its forty-acre Heslington Road site to developers the PJ Livesey Group.
New LDW for East Midlands
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) has announced that a new Local Development Worker (LDW) for the East Midlands region will start in spring. Sarah Shaw will serve Leicester, Notts and Derby, and Lincolnshire Area Meetings from 4 April. Two other new LDWs started early in the year. Ruth Audus is working with...
JRF calls for urgent action on ‘deep poverty’
Rising energy prices will ‘devastate’ the poorest families, the Quaker-founded Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has said.
Letters - 18 February 2022
Special numbers At several recent Quaker Meetings, Friends have shared their thoughts and offered suggestions about how to prevent the current intense frustrations, and very unQuakerly feelings of anger, circulating in their minds and hearts, over recent government activities. One idea which I was already enjoying telling folk about, was...