Issue 01-02-2024
Featured story
Just imagine: Helen Buckroyd’s Thought for the week
Early in the new year, many of us reflect on how we might change for the better. Often, coupled with a desire for physical change, comes a thirst for a spiritual or mental change, and the January media offers many tips for those in the pursuit of happiness.
Top stories
Keeping score: David & Joolz Saunders remember a dramatic musical composition
As this George Fox anniversary year gets underway, those of us of a musical mind might find ourselves recalling a musical composition based on Fox’s life. It was called The Fire and the Hammer, and is a cantata with words by Alec Davison and music by Tony Biggin (readers...
Step change: Angela Greenwood reflects on a day of witness
Like many of us, I feel challenged and pained by the troubles and hurts around me, and the unbearable horrors we see acted out both nearby and in far away places. We can feel helpless, and pushed to act – but what to do and how to respond? A profound question,...
Crime against nature? Marian Liebmann and Mike Nellis on ecocide
Friends have rightly been wary of criminalisation as a means of addressing socially harmful behaviour when other forms of resolution can be used instead. We oppose criminalisation which uses state power to erode democracy and suppress dissent. But we are not against criminalisation when it is based on the gravity...
Edinburgh Friends address food poverty
Edinburgh Quakers have said that a local foodbank where many Friends volunteer is struggling with donations for the first time.
Joined-up writing: Gill Sewell and Olivia Sewell-Risley seek contributions for the Friends Quarterly
In 2023 in the Friends Quarterly, we explored ‘feelings’, ‘preparation for Yearly Meeting’, ‘outreach’ and ‘grief’. Planning for 2024 is already underway. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll soon receive an issue with a focus on faith – faith as it is expressed and experienced in a variety of ways, within the...
All articles
Friends resist petroleum bill
Friends have backed warnings that the government’s oil and gas bill threatens to undermine COP28 commitments.
Scottish children’s bill gets royal assent
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Bill officially received royal assent in Scotland last week. The bill will come into force on 16 July 2024.
‘Storm Jocelyn’ named after Quaker
The bad weather that hit UK shores last week was named ‘Storm Jocelyn’ in honour of Quaker Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
Novelist speaks on Quaker aid in Spanish civil war
The novelist Maggie Brookes discussed her new book about Quaker aid in the Spanish civil war in Friends House last week.
Eco Hub: Sue Hampton gets a green light
I’m a member of Berkhamsted Meeting. I’m also the founder of the local branch of Extinction Rebellion, and it was after XR’s ‘The Big One’ march last year – supported by Quakers in Britain – that I called a meeting of local groups that might plough common ground together....
Eye - 02 February 2024
Sing a song of Swann Rosemary Mathew, of Cambridge Jesus Lane Meeting, popped this piccy in the Eye mailbag after spying a Quaker mention somewhere she hadn’t expected. She writes: ‘This photo is of part of a small exhibition about Donald Swann in the Music Department at the [Cambridge]...
Dinosaurs
It was not from the tongues of angels that came the whine of exocets intent on harm to tribesmen, comrades, friends. The deaths are classified ‘collateral’: puffs of dust across a landscape of ‘we have no option but to…’
Letters - 02 February 2024
Brought to book I write to assure Anne Wade (Letters, 18 January) that I share her distaste for banning books, and to correct factual inaccuracies in her letter. The Quaker Bookshop has never been threatened by or pandered to ‘gangs of masked, hooded, black-clad transactivist men’, nor have we had to...