Issue 04-05-2012
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Our Prayer
God in all of us re- membered be your name.
Top stories
Culture and conscience
There was a minor furore last year when the Poetry Book Society, which organises Britain’s most prestigious poetry award, the T S Eliot Prize, lost Arts Council funding and a hedge fund firm called Aurum stepped in to save it. The organisers of the prize were relieved but two...
Epistle from the Sixth World Conference
To Friends Everywhere, We greet you amid the beauty of the Rift Valley, surrounded by the welcoming embrace of Kenyan Friends. From April 17 to 25, 2012 close to 850 men and women from all the streams of Friends, coming from 112 yearly meetings and groups in 51 countries have gathered at Kabarak University near...
Visit of Nobel Laureate
A Nobel Peace Prize winner visited Friends House on Monday and encouraged Quakers to keep campaigning for peace. Argentine activist Adolfo Perez Esquivel renewed his friendship with British Quakers with whom he had worked during the Falklands War thirty years ago.
Quaker speaks out against ‘deadly trade’
A Quaker delivered an impromptu speech at a gathering of arms dealers in London after interrupting an address by business secretary Vince Cable.
Only those who see
The words of ‘Guide me, Oh Thou great Jehovah’, in Irish translation, resonated round the hall as we sang with gusto, if not great linguistic accuracy! Richard Harrison, our translator, was forgiving. Children’s voices and laughter intermingled. At times of silence the trill of a blackbird filtered through an...
All articles
Bath Quaker to ‘Live Below the Line’
A Quaker in Bath will spend no more than a pound a day on her food and drink next week. Wren Sidhe is joining the ‘Live Below the Line’ challenge, launched by Christian Aid in solidarity with the world’s poorest people.
Responsible lending
The UK government is blocking attempts at the United Nations (UN) to discuss how governments can lend and borrow responsibly. The news comes from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Doha, Qatar.
Quaker takes the plunge
An eighty-six-year-old Quaker has completed a 170-length sponsored swim to raise funds to tackle malaria. Trevor Jaggar, of Uxbridge Meeting, was inspired to take the plunge after attending an interfaith event run by Malaria No More.
The last taboo explored
Quakers in Leeds are sponsoring a conference to explore ‘the last taboo’ – death and dying. The gathering on 12 May will explore ‘all points of view’ on the issues, according to organiser Ben Francis. Speakers include Emily Jackson, an expert in medical law and Chris Larner, who accompanied his wife...
Quakers in dialogue
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) has been thinking a lot about advocacy. The practice and practicality of dialogue is a key component of this. It was, therefore, timely that twenty-four Friends and an observer from the world of the churches met at Woodbrooke in Easter week to talk about it.
A Peace of Africa
We have been fed so many ‘disaster Africa’ images that it takes a conscious effort to look further and realize that there are many aspects of life there that are superior to those in the West – such as the way people cooperate to achieve things and families help each other...
Life Lines
Some things in life are just beyond our imagining. What it was like to be faced with the gas chambers and ovens of Buchenwald is, mercifully, not in our own experience and, for most of us, the nightmare belongs to past history. Yet the fact of the Holocaust, and the...
Eye - 04 May 2012
Kingston on the move In 1656 John Fielder and his wife Ann ‘gave up their house for a Meeting place and accordingly a Meeting was settled’ in Kingston in Surrey. Three hundred and fifty years later the current Meeting house (sketch by Geoffery Weeden) has just been sold and Kingston Friends...
Letters - 04 May 2012
Sustainability Sustainability is a word widely encountered in today’s media and in conversations. It has not always been so. Rather global banking activities and environmental destruction, as well as personal lifestyles, have been completely unsustainable, hence the many crises now confronting us. The fact is that we have been...