Issue 19-07-2013
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Shared values
In 1938 my family and I were saved from the Nazis by members of the Religious Society of Friends. My brother and I, when we came to Britain, were then given two free years at Quaker boarding schools. After two years my father could afford to support us. All of our...
Top stories
An old family Bible
When my mother died in 2007, at the age of ninety-three, I acquired many of the family archives. These had always intrigued me as a child, studying family trees or old letters dating back some hundreds of years. Much of our family’s earliest Quaker ancestry is gleaned from a family...
QUNO in top 100 peace builders
The Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) has been praised as one of the 100 most influential global actors in reducing armed violence. Andrew Tomlinson and Jonathan Woolley (above), directors of the QUNO New York and Geneva offices, are named by leading NGO Action on Armed Violence in their recent top 100...
First charges for anti-drones protest
Six activists, including a Quaker and two priests, will stand trial in October for damaging a fence during a protest at RAF Waddington on 3 June. The Lincolnshire RAF base is used to operate unmanned drone aircraft.
Justice and peace pilgrims spark debate
A British Legion chairman has described recent actions of the Peace and Economic Justice pilgrims as ‘a total insult and a total lack of respect’. His remarks followed the arrival of the pilgrimage at York on Armed Forces Day, 29 June. The pilgrims walked through the city handing out anti-war...
Equal marriage ‘tantalisingly close’
The House of Lords has passed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill at Third Reading, sending it back to the House of Commons for final agreement. Some peers wore pink carnations to mark the occasion. Quakers greeted the House’s overwhelming support for the Bill with joy. Paul Parker,...
All articles
Roseline Akhalu back in court
On Thursday 18 July Roseline Akhalu faced yet another court ordeal to defend two previous judges’ decisions that she should be allowed to stay in the UK.
Myth and reality
Four churches – the Methodist Church, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Church of Scotland and the United Reformed Church – recently produced a report that addresses six of the most common myths about poverty in Britain today. The report – The lies we tell ourselves: ending comfortable myths about poverty – cites...
Friends in Wales
The remote Pales Meeting House was unusually busy on the morning of 22 June as Friends in Wales arrived for their Meeting. A convoy of colourful vintage cars emerged along the narrow mountain road above and descended to the valley below to continue their rally along the A44 to the English...
A guided mystic
At Britain Yearly Meeting in 2012, by pure coincidence (or synchronicity), I sat next to a London Friend in one of the sessions where we shared, for a couple of minutes, our experience of ‘being a Quaker’ with the person next to us.
Space consciousness
Sometimes in the Experiment with Light meditation an image, or an insight, can come up that is not only helpful for us personally, but which seems to have a universal relevance and value. I had such an experience at the recent Experiment with Light regional gathering at Cambridge.
Truth
Truth is such a big Quaker word. Almost as big as love. It often has a capital T. It has been big from the start. Early Friends came out of the churches falling away from the faith of the church as it was in the 1650s. They spoke out,...
Endings and beginnings
While visiting Cape Town recently, I was shaken by an inequality that made it hard to relax. Townships with savage poverty exist as ghettos a few miles away from the most expensive real estate in Africa. In the modest flat where we stayed there were three lines of security. A...
Eye - 19 July 2013
Transforming rags for the runway A dress made entirely from ties and another from rejected shirts were among the seventy outfits shown at one of the first ‘Rags to Runway’ fashion shows on 20 June. Students from Leighton Park School, founded on Quaker values in 1890, and ‘Oxfam Reworked’ volunteers transformed items...
Letters - 19 July 2013
Population With reference to occasional correspondence on population (14 and 21 June), there has been a disturbing development. A UN report, World Population Prospects: the 2012 revision, has revised projections for 2050. Whereas the medium-variant projection of nine billion for that year has been uncritically accepted up to now, the report now puts this...