Issue 09-03-2012
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Healing, not hurting
Our daughter died at the age of ten following a road traffic accident. She was on a life support machine, which was switched off in a matter of days, not weeks or months or even years (probably a blessing). We had to make the decision.
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The eviction of Occupy
‘The Great Creator… made the Earth to be a common treasury,’ wrote Gerrard Winstanley in 1649, shortly before his Digger community was evicted from common land. ‘Not one word was spoken in the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another.’
Pendle Hill
Submit yourself to God Submit your whole being to God Let God carry you lightly Allow yourself to be amazed
The object of our nonbelief
What sort of a God is it, I wonder, in whom so many people (including, it seems, some Friends) don’t believe? Could it possibly be the God of the newspaper cartoonists – an elderly bearded superman sitting on a throne ‘on a cloud’ and occasionally reaching down into his creation...
Eye - 09 March 2012
Others who attended a recent Young Friends residential weekend echoed these sentiments from Beth Furini, 17, of Brighton Meeting:
A Quaker at Sea
It is the ‘Great Depression’. Your father’s Scarborough high street business has gone bust. You are fifteen years old and must leave your Quaker school. You are offered an apprenticeship in the merchant navy, although no one in your family has a history of going to sea, and you...
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Quakers continue at St Pauls
Quakers will continue a weekly Meeting for Worship on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral despite the eviction of the ‘Occupy’ camp. In an epistle produced on Sunday, they pledged to seek ‘new ways to speak truth to power’.
Pacifism in deed
Pacifist campaigners have criticised parts of the media for repeatedly misusing the word ‘pacifism’. Members of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) say that commentators frequently equate pacifism with passivity, giving up or ‘doing nothing’.
International Women’s Day builds bridges of peace
As the world marked International Women’s Day this week, a charity called for a renewed focus on the experience of women in war.
Report challenges Trident renewal
The plan to spend more than £25m on a nuclear deterrent has been described as ‘nonsensical’ by an independent report. The paper, from the independent liberal think tank CentreForum, argues that the proposal to renew Trident should be scrapped because there is no foreseeable threat to Britain.
Concerns over legal aid reform
Quaker concerns over the impact that changes to legal aid will have on the poorest and most vulnerable in society have been echoed in the House of Lords.
Syria in crisis
The legal philosopher Neil McCormick said that jurisprudence is peddling in the shallows of philosophy. I am inclined to agree. If a cause is right or wrong, it should be possible to make an argument without appeals to law.
Seeing animals differently
In their introduction to Living By Voices We Shall Never Hear - a collection of reflections, poems and essays - editors Pauline and Les Mitchell put the matter bluntly: for thousands of years, nonhuman animals ‘have been our unpaid, unacknowledged and, for the most part, appallingly treated slaves on whose...
Letters - 09 March 2012
Beleaguered Trident Do Britain Yearly Meeting and General Meeting for Scotland support the campaign against the renewal of Trident reported in the last four paragraphs of your news page (24 February)? If we do why is this not reported, if we don’t why not? David M Robson Ed: Britain Yearly...