Issue 14-03-2014
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Lent
It’s a funny old world nowadays. You can have strawberries when you want them instead of just at the beginning of June; you can have daffodils all year round and hot cross buns at Christmas. That is fine if you grow daffodils and strawberries in the Andes and fly...
Top stories
The changing landscape
‘Change’ has been a theme of Quakers in Criminal Justice (QICJ) conferences before, but perhaps never more appositely than now, when across-the-board policy shifts are significantly changing criminal justice structures in England and Wales. The recent QICJ conference, held at Woodbrooke on 21-23 February, addressed ‘The Changing Landscape of the ...
Sustainability - Responding to Canterbury
Firstly, we must acknowledge that most Friends were much further on, in August 2011 at Canterbury, than we were in demonstrating, practically, their commitment to sustainability. Secondly, that our decisions were based on our particular financial circumstances (we were not poor) and the fact that we are both semi-retired. This means...
Towards the Source
Until I moved south last year, my ‘big Meeting’ used to be General Meeting for Scotland, so at my first Meeting of Friends in Wales, held in Montgomery on 22 February, it was interesting to notice both obvious similarities and unexpected differences.
Visiting Coolham
As I walk across the school hall, I am greeted with the sound of soft music playing in the background. On the floor, just over one hundred children, aged between five and eleven, sit cross-legged in neat rows, smart as paint in their scarlet and grey uniform. They are the...
Friends choose to fast
Quaker Meetings throughout Britain are being encouraged to take part in the national day of fasting on April 4 and to support the End Hunger Fast campaign by holding events and lobbying their local MPs. Chris Skidmore, clerk of Yearly Meeting for Quakers in Britain, is one of a number...
All articles
Mental health on the agenda
Friends from across Britain are meeting at Friends House in London on Saturday 15 March to discuss whether a specifically Quaker understanding of mental health has emerged from recent concerns and gatherings.
Fair Penny petition opens to organisations
Over a thousand people have now signed the Fair Penny petition set up by Friends in Wanstead. Those who sign the petition pledge that they are prepared to pay an extra penny in income tax in order to protect the most vulnerable in society from the effect of austerity...
Quaker school governors meet
How boarders are best integrated into Quaker schools was one of the themes of the recent conference of governors of Quaker schools. The conference, which was held at the end of February at the University of Warwick’s Scarman Conference Centre, was addressed by Stuart Westley, of the Association...
Age and mental health
What do Quakers do about mental health? Where is the spiritual drive? Obviously, we have some good history from The Retreat in York – but an Area Meeting looking at dementia? Is this part of a welcome step forward? What do you dread most about getting older? I have always...
Beliefs and traditions
‘Where two or three are gathered together… there’s a schism.’ I don’t know where this saying originates, but I first heard it from the wife of an Evangelical Lutheran pastor. The sectarian tendency of Reformed Christianity has resulted in numerous different versions of a message that is diminished...
Glimpses of the divine
The first time I knowingly came across testimonies to the grace of God as shown in the lives of deceased Friends was in Quaker News. For a period until the mid-2000s, it had a pullout supplement containing recently received testimonies and, in the first one I read, one aspect...
Eye - 14 March 2014
Spiritual journeys, peace, poverty and sustainability were just some of the things explored at the most recent Young Friends General Meeting (YFGM) in February. Forty-five Friends aged eighteen to thirty-ish travelled from across Britain to gather at Manchester Meeting House for a weekend packed with discussion, worship and fellowship.
Letters - 14 March 2014
Copyright concerns I was delighted to see one of my cartoons, originally in the Parrot, the Westminster Meeting newsletter, reproduced (with my permission) in the Friend (28 February). However, shortly afterwards, I discovered that my cartoon, as it appeared in the Friend, had been scanned and uploaded to a Quaker Meetingâ€...