Issue 05-10-2012
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Our challenge
Picture four people discussing the role of the church. Two considered inequalities in society; facts about homelessness, unemployment and poverty. They dealt with the role of large corporations and how unscrupulous politicians facilitate their actions. They touched on how misguided financial mechanisms bring much of the world to recession and...
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Kicking the bucket
‘Why are you obsessed with all this?’ my old friend Helen asked the other day. ‘Not obsessed’, I said, ‘passionate’. The first knowing Death. I have travelled with it from an early age, not through traumatic loss but it has just jostled into view. When I was fifteen,...
Natural burial
Last year I attended the first natural burial I had been to. I was little prepared for the effect it had on me, being busy caught up with getting the time off work, not being late and so on. At the end of July it was raining. But the...
Quaker Week … some events
All over Britain Friends and Meetings have been engaged in a wide range of activities to promote Quaker Week 2012. Raymond Mgadzah reports on how some Meetings have taken part.
Indiana YM moves towards separation
Quakerism in Indiana is on the verge of a significant shift after an anxious and challenging period. In the past few years there has been growing division among some Meetings in Indiana Yearly Meeting (IYM). The differences of opinion mainly concerned the ‘subject of homosexuality and religious authority’...
Quakers join march for landless
Quakers in Britain are among a global chain of people showing solidarity with landless Indian villagers. There was cautious celebration when Indian government ministers appeared to meet demands to give land rights to the poorest. A massive nonviolent protest march is planned.
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A Quaker Olympic legacy?
Exhausted and miserable, I staggered over the finishing line of the third-year cross-country course. Everyone had gone home and forgotten all about me. Naturally, I was never picked for anyone’s team. I am certainly not a hockey international. Decades later, a psychologist diagnosed dyspraxia and explained why I have...
Olympism
The spirit that was displayed by everyone who participated in and witnessed the Olympic and Paralympic Games of London 2012 has been widely celebrated.
Further encounters with god
It is very difficult to write down mystical experiences. There are no adequate words. Attempting to fit words to ineffable experiences is also emotionally draining. To try to explain mystical experiences to others is also to try to explain to oneself, and the effort to do so involves reliving the...
War on terror
When Maximilien Robespierre was challenged to justify the new French Republic’s wars with neighbouring countries, he replied: ‘without war there can be no terror – without terror there can be no revolution.’
What’s in a word?
Teilhard de Chardin called them ‘diminishments’ – in common parlance ‘the disabilities of old age’: stark words for what is (when all’s said and done) a natural process.
Eye - 05 October 2012
Quakers and CoCoThrow Eye was pleased to hear from Susan Robson, who shared this picture from the CoCoThrow sideshow on 16 September.
Letters - 05 October 2012
Time for a change? I think David Holmes has touched on a key point when he reminded us (7 September) that our changed structure has become one that is related to geographical identity. It has become a horizontal structure rather than a vertical one. For new growth our nurturing must be...