Issue 21-07-2023
Featured story
Early days: Tony D’Souza’s Thought for the week
It’s finally happened. I am officially a Twirly. Let me explain. ‘Twirly’ is London Underground slang for pensioners with a free travel pass. The pass can’t be used before 9.30am, so on some mornings there is a group of retired people waiting in the ticket hall, asking staff, ...
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What the hell? Neil Crabtree finds a lesson in a near-death experience
Thirty years ago I walked off a mental heath unit, where I had been sectioned after a severe psychotic episode. It was evening, and I was wet and cold. I believed that I was the devil, and that everyone on the street knew that too. A quiet voice in my...
Ben Edson to be new Woodbrooke CEO
Woodbrooke has announced Ben Edson as the new CEO of Woodbrooke Learning & Research. He will start in September, bringing what Woodbrooke descibed as ‘a wealth of experience in faith-based and educational institutions across the last two decades’. He was most recently director of St Peter’s House Chaplaincy, an...
Article of faiths: Angela Arnold visits an interfaith group
When the North Wales Interfaith Group invited me to their online meeting, I wasn’t expecting much. Some general pleasantness maybe, or some planning for a public event. But what I learned – about us Quakers – took me by surprise.
Reunited kingdom: Keith Archer has a ‘new covenant’ experience
This May, six friends and I met at the Château de Bossey, near Geneva, home of the Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches. Fifty-five years ago (gosh!) we spent five months there as students. There were about sixty of us then, from all over the world, and...
Arms intervention: Alastair McIntosh on nuclear weapons
Last month, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its annual report. Included was the finding that global stockpiles of operational nuclear weapons had increased during 2022.
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Quakers speak on Ukraine
The Quaker group Northern Friends Peace Board (NFPB) is calling on all governments and international organisations to create ‘the preconditions for a just peace’, in light of the continuing war in Ukraine. This will involve ‘planning the reconstruction of the areas devastated by the war and restitution’, and ‘rehabilitation of...
Friends counter climate denialism
Friends are backing a network that is working across the UK to tackle climate denialism. The initiative, called MP Watch, has been set up to monitor climate deniers.
BYM tells PM to back climate promises
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) has called on Rishi Sunak to keep his promises on climate finance. BYM joined ninety-one other organisations in writing to the prime minister to ask him to stand by his commitment to a £11.6bn climate finance fund.
FWCC ‘birthday pack’ for George Fox
Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) has published a birthday pack to help Meetings and schools celebrate George Fox’s 400th birthday next year.
Earth’s Voices: Messages for our times from nature’s guardians, by Laura Newbury
As an art student, Laura Newbury tried to capture the beauty of nature around the River Nairn, in northern Scotland. Thirty years or so later she returned to the moors and began to converse with the ‘nature guardian’ of the area. She calls this guardian a deva: Immortelle, an angel...
Eye - 21 July 2023
Friends of a feather Friends flock together for many reasons, and some groups become a Quaker Recognised Body of Britain Yearly Meeting. Here you’ll find a selection of these groups. Eye hopes it inspires you to take a look at the relevant webpage and connect with any of them...
Letters -21 July 2023
Wittgenstein’s views I commend the Friend for waxing philosophical (7 July), but Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views diametrically contradict Quakerism. He sought to reform philosophy, and thereby counter the chaos of the first world war, by insisting on clarity of definition – in other words ‘first define your terms’. In the absence...