Issue 17-02-2023
Featured story
Building up your hope: Danina Stefan’s Thought for the week
This week, after some interesting ministries at Meeting for Worship, I have been thinking about hope. It came to me that despair, the opposite of hope, often comes after we create a wall of strong opinions. This wall may be based on upsetting facts or half-truths, but it doesn’t...
Top stories
As Friends around the Yearly Meeting consider reparations, Nim Njuguna writes to a sceptic
Dear Friend, this is my third attempt to write this letter to you, after tonight’s Threshing Meeting on reparations. I tore up the other two after I realised you were going to read more about my anger than my reasons for my discontent.
Meeting with approval: Tony D’Souza has a bold adventure
It’s a wintery Sunday morning and it’s freezing outside. The wind is blowing the sleet almost horizontally across my window, and I can see it billowing and eddying on the black tarmac road outside. Despite this, I am putting on my warm clothes to go to a Quaker...
Counsel of despair: Neil Morgan finds an other solution
In Meeting for Worship recently, someone ministered about a person they knew. They had, sadly, taken their own life. They wanted to simply tell us about it, and say aloud the person’s name. It was a brave, deeply tender contribution.
Quaker-raised Bonnie Raitt wins thirteenth Grammy
The Quaker-raised musician Bonnie Raitt won this year’s Grammy Award for the Song Of The Year, along with another two for Best Americana Performance and Best American Roots Song. These brought her total Grammy haul to 13.
On the Level: Poems on living with multiple sclerosis, by Bryan Monte
What’s it really like living with a permanent disability that confines you to a wheelchair? Bryan Monte is a Quaker who lives in Amsterdam, where he formerly taught English in a university. He suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS), a condition that not only disables you but nags at you...
All articles
Lords throws out Public Order Bill proposals
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) has said that it continues to be ‘seriously concerned’ about government attempts to ‘stifle voices of dissent’ and ‘undermine democracy’. The warnings came last week despite news that the House of Lords had thrown out key elements of the Public Order Bill aimed at stifling protest.
Harrow Friends fund generators in Ukraine
Harrow Quakers have funded two generators in Ukraine using a Friend’s substantial legacy. The idea came during a Christmas lunch when one Friend suggested the Meeting did something for the people of Ukraine, and another remembered reading that generators are badly needed in the country.
Friends highlight green-washing ‘carbon offsets’
Quakers have highlighted a recent study showing that the ‘carbon offsets’ approved by the world’s biggest certification provider are largely worthless. The investigation into rainforest carbon offset credits approved by Verra found that more than ninety per cent of the credits offered did not represent real carbon reductions.
Quaker housing charity talks to Edinburgh Quakers
Quaker Housing Trust (QHT) has said that a fall in donations is limiting their ability to meet the demand for their funding support.
Eye - 17 February 2023
A compelling cameo Do you enjoy a spot of medical drama of an afternoon? Eagle-eyed Quaker viewers of BBC One’s Doctors on 6 February may have spied a familiar setting. The episode included a storyline about a woman trying to escape her abusive husband. The women’s refuge she is...
Rebellion
These dandelions – no show girls but they know how to pop up where they’re not wanted go on, do your worst on tarmac and paving stone Parliament Square, Waterloo Bridge padlocked into earth with combination roots go on, arrest me not ashamed to flaunt the green rosette around their...
Letters - 17 February 2023
‘That of God’ When citing ‘that of God in every man’, Friends should not think that George Fox used the phrase only once in his epistles. It occurs at least a dozen times, most often in the form ‘every man and woman’ or ‘every one’. He often prefixed it...