Issue 09-05-2014
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Lions and donkeys
Next Thursday, 15 May, is International Conscientious Objectors Day, which this year has special significance as the nationwide centennial commemorations of the first world war get underway. London’s Tavistock Square, home of the memorial to Conscientious Objectors (COs), will be filled with peace activists, including many descendants of the 16,600 men...
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Intellect versus Spirit
Can the intellect say anything useful or meaningful about the Spirit? I am going to argue that it cannot and we should not try to say anything about God or the Spirit. What we can talk about is the impact that a relationship with the ineffable has upon us, and...
2014 EMES Epistle
To Friends everywhere, We send you loving greetings from The Cultural Centre of St Thomas, in Strasbourg, where forty-seven of us, representing Quakers from eighteen European countries, have been holding our annual meeting. Meeting with each other, and with our Friends from the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage Committee (also meeting...
Quakers in Malta
In 1659 two British Quakers, Sarah Cheevers and Katharine Evans, arrived on the island of Malta. St Paul, shipwrecked there 1,600 years or so earlier, had converted the island to Christianity and now, the women assumed, it was the turn of Quakers to carry out their little bit of outreach. The...
The Friend launches 1914-18 Digital Archive appeal
This issue of the Friend contains an appeal letter for our exciting new project to make all copies of the Friend from world war one available online. They are a treasure trove of British social history and offer a fascinating insight into the life and witness of Friends at...
Change at Newtown
Newtown School in Waterford, one of Ireland’s oldest Quaker schools, has become the latest minority faith school in the country to enter the Free Education scheme. The school says the decision was made because of a combination of financial pressure and a desire to become ‘more accessible’, in...
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Russian Friends statement on Ukraine
Friends in Russia have called for restraint by all parties in Ukraine and abstention from violence in any form in order to avoid bloodshed. In a Monthly Meeting minute, adopted on 26 April, Friends stated that they ‘strongly oppose all possible seeds of war in ourselves and others’ and declared...
Margaret Fell’s 400th birthday
The Quaker Tapestry held a 400th birthday party for Margaret Fell on 30 April and also celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Tapestry in Kendal. The event, which was held in the Meeting house in Kendal, commemorated the life and witness of one of the leaders of early Quakerism. It...
Lichfield twentieth anniversary celebration
This year the twentieth anniversary of Litchfield Local Meeting coincides with International Conscientious Objectors Day. Local Friends are recognising both events with activities next week. Anthony Wilson, of Lichfield Meeting and the Quaker Service Memorial Trust, said that Friends were marking International Conscientious Objectors Day by gathering at the...
Intentions not promises
Marriage is a useful and easily recognised concept carrying many privileges of practical use. But as Friends our first aims are to face reality and avoid hypocrisy. It is time our marriage commitments steered towards real intentions rather than unreal promises. In wording certificates Friends have already dropped ‘obey’. â€...
Ah, yes, but…
First, the bad news. Over the last three months our electricity usage has almost trebled. Now, the good news. Our spending on fuel has fallen from about £140 a month to almost nothing! Yes, folks, Carboholic is now the proud owner of a Nissan Leaf, a real all-electric car. This car...
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins is not at all the misanthrope, thinking poisonous thoughts about humanity, which some people suppose. On the contrary; he loved his parents, his boyhood in Africa, Oxford, science, poetry, music and many of his colleagues. He had fond parents. His father, a botanist who had studied at...
Not ideas about the war but the war itself
Dad hated those processions: strangulated distant bugles, rifles butting Whitehall tarmac, doleful incantations from the comfortable clergy resurrecting Albert, Chalky and those other lads who ‘grew not old as we that are left grow old’. And then the trumpet keening like a scrawny seagull over downturned heads and surreptitious coughs.
Eye - 9 May 2014
John Perkin delights eye at Friends House The highly distinctive paintings of Quaker artist John Perkin will be turning many an eye this summer at Friends House. A small retrospective exhibition, organised by the Quaker Arts Network (QAN), of the late artist (1927-2012) is on show between 12 May and 10...
Letters - 09 May 2014
Do Quakers have doctrine? Jane Taylor (2 May) has expressed concern about the use of the word ‘doctrine’ in relation to the Quaker way. In terms of etymology, the word doctrine comes from the Latin doctrina, which means ‘teaching’ or ‘body of teachings’. Is it really the case that Quakers have...