Issue 24-05-2013
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Taking the long way home
‘Your holy hearsay is not evidence. Give me the good news in the present tense.’ I first encountered these words of Sydney Carter’s while a student at Woodbrooke in the late 1970s, as the title of a powerful exploration of contemporary theology by Joan Fitch of Ambleside...
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Swarthmore Lecture: Life stories
What was your initial response to the challenge of giving the Swarthmore lecture? The first response was like Juliet’s, on being asked her thoughts on marriage: ‘It is an honour that I dream not of.’ As Juliet grows in the play, in her sense and definition of what...
Salter Lecture: The history of a future?
Capitalism is increasingly being challenged. That there must be significant change in our economic system is said, written and read more frequently than for a long time. The Quaker Socialist Society Salter Lecture will be given this year by Ed Mayo, secretary general of Co-operatives UK and formerly of the...
Mental health in our Meetings
For me, the most vital Quaker testimony is that to equality. If we truly believe that we are created equal, unique, precious, a child of God, how can we treat any human being as not worthy of the same consideration and respect as anyone else? When mental health issues create...
The web is Friendship
Occasionally, when I am working with a group on the nature of our community, I give out balls of knitting wool and ask people to pass a strand of wool to someone they know, who then passes it on to someone else, who passes it on to yet another person…...
A commitment to peace
The posters from the archives of the Northern Friends Peace Board (NFPB), reproduced for our centenary, reflect some of Friends’ peace concerns over the years. What brings these concerns to life, however, are the words and the stories of Friends, individually and collectively.
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The Large Meeting House: moving on
Whatever else happens at Yearly Meeting this year, for some Friends Yearly Meeting 2013 will be remembered as ‘the last Yearly Meeting in the Large Meeting House as it used to be’. Perhaps, for many of those people it will be a moment of excitement; for a few of us, deep...
Enjoying Yearly Meeting
It is May and I am looking forward to Yearly Meeting. I always do. I love the magic of sharing in worship and worship for business with a thousand other focused Friends. Nevertheless, I find Yearly Meeting often verges on the overwhelming. All the noise and bustle and nonstop information...
Endless war to end war?
We are already clear that aggression is an integral part of the psyche of the ruling elites in this country. We need look no further than the creation of our two vast floating fortresses recently modified to take aircraft able to land in extreme hot and dusty conditions to see...
The Last Runaway
The latest novel by award-winning writer Tracy Chevalier is set in a Quaker settlement in Ohio in the mid-1850s. Tracy Chevalier grew up attending Quaker summer camps and her sister and stepmother joined the Religious Society of Friends. ‘I never did’, she explained in a recent interview with...
Poetry saves my soul
Poetry is my way out of a deep dark hole It brightens up my soul, gets the depression out.
The Quaker clockmakers of north Oxfordshire
This June an exhibition in Adderbury, Oxfordshire, celebrates the work of a highly original group of Quaker clockmakers in the county. Friends arrived in Puritan Banbury during the 1650s and, during the second half of the seventeenth century, established themselves in the rural area to the west and south of...