Issue 26-07-2013

Featured story

Thought for the Week: Hard times

FREE 25 Jul 2013 | by Tim Cook

About two years ago I started keeping a journal. I began it at a time when I was starting to attend Quaker Meeting regularly and was also facing the prospect of early retirement, both of which events certainly played an important part in my feeling a need to do this....

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Top stories

Beyond forgiving

25 Jul 2013 | by Howard Grace

Ginn Fourie (left) and Letlapa Mphahlele (right). | Photo: Photo courtesy of Howard Grace.

South Africans Ginn Fourie and Letlapa Mphahlele form an unlikely team: a white Christian woman and a black atheist man. One has suffered directly from the actions of the other, but both have been victims – and risen beyond their pain. What brings them together is a profound story of tragedy...

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Journey into life

25 Jul 2013 | by Roger Ellis

Roger Ellis considers the published version of Gerald Hewitson’s 2013 Swarthmore Lecture | Photo: Photo: Kaustav Das Modak / flickr CC.

Of all Christian traditions, Quakers are most committed to a mystical understanding of religion. They share this understanding with the Carthusians and Cistercians, and with the mystics of the Church. This explains why George Fox felt such affinity with the sixteenth-century Lutheran mystic Jakob Boehme. It is also why our...

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Pilgrims arrive in London

25 Jul 2013 | by Ian Kirk-Smith

Six of the pilgrims in front of 10 Downing Street ready to hand over their declaration and a petition. | Photo: Photo: Veronika Tudhope.

The pilgrims involved in the 2013 UK Pilgrimage for Peace and Economic Justice finally arrived in London last weekend – sixty-two days after leaving Iona.  The journey, which began in Iona off the west coast of Scotland on 19 May, had taken a small group of pilgrims from one end of Britain...

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Declaration of the 2013 UK Pilgrimage for Peace and Economic Justice

25 Jul 2013 | by The 2013 UK Pilgrimage for Peace and Economic Justice

Nuclear weapons are unique in their destructive power, in the unspeakable human suffering they cause, in the impossibility of controlling their effects in space and time, in the risks of escalation they create, and in the threat they pose to the environment, to future generations, and indeed to the survival...

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Royal assent for same sex marriage bill

FREE 25 Jul 2013 | by Caroline Humphries

The change in the law that allows same sex couples in England and Wales to marry in Quaker Meetings has been welcomed by the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain.  The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill received royal assent on Wednesday 17 July.

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All articles

Call for credit cost cap

25 Jul 2013 | by Caroline Humphries

The Association of Christian Financial Advisers (ACFA) is calling for a cap on the cost of credit.  The call follows new research from R3, the Association of Business Recovery Professionals, which shows that people with payday loans are racking up overdrafts to pay them off.

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Lover of souls

25 Jul 2013 | by Marie Noon

The love I bear to the souls of all men makes me willing to undergo whatever can be inflicted on me  – Elizabeth Hooton Elizabeth Hooton’s words came to life for me on 21 June in Rugby Meeting House. Lynn Morris’s one woman show, Lover of Souls, opened with...

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Travelling in ministry: Elders’ gifts and authority

25 Jul 2013 | by Thomas Swain

One of my requests to Meetings that invited me to share about Spirit given gifts, was to gather on Friday evening with elders of the Meeting. It would be helpful for these Friends to give me an understanding of the concerns of their Meetings. There was no specific agenda except...

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Eye - 26 July 2013

25 Jul 2013 | by Eye

When you go a-walking 756 miles, countless blisters and touching acts of kindness. The 2013 UK Pilgrimage for Peace and Economic Justice has been an inspirational act of witness.

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Letters - 26 July 2013

25 Jul 2013 | by The Friend

Mental health in Meetings I want to reply to the anonymous article on ‘Mental health in Meetings’ (12 July). Depressed people are their own worst enemies – I’m one myself, so I should know! Their outlook is compulsively negative and they don’t go in for ‘happy endings’. I’ve just...

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