Issue 29-07-2011
Featured story
Editorial
Refugees queue up for clean water in the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya. The Dadaab camps were originally built to fit 90,000 people. Today the number of refugees living there is around 370,000. In 2010 the three camps in Dadaab received around forty new child refugees a month. Now 800 are coming...
Top stories
Outside the bubble
Changing how we live is hard work and yet leads to joyful companionship. It starts with a new view of reality, perhaps different from ‘normal reality’ (the one with ‘the news’ and the ‘rustly’ packets in the convenience store). The financial crisis happened because some people were able to...
Sustaining our worlds
Sustaining the worlds we live in seems to need more charity, hope and faith with each day that passes. Of these three, faith – faith in action – is, for me, the hardest. Hope takes root when all reason for it has disappeared. Charity takes root when we no longer feel...
Interview: Pam Lunn
Costing not less than everything: sustainability and spirituality in challenging times, Pam Lunn’s Swarthmore lecture is at 7.30pm on Monday 1 August in the Big Top. Pam talks to the Friend about her background, influences and faith. What was your early background?
Quaker silhouettes
Portraits of early Quakers are extremely rare. One of the reasons for this was strictly practical – most Friends did not come from the social class that could afford painted portraits. However, there were also serious religious objections to images of all kinds. Early Quakers shared with other nonconformist religious groups...
What does love require of us at Canterbury?
On Friday 5 August Britain Yearly Meeting Gathering in Canterbury will decide what to say or do – if anything – about sustainability. Unusually there are no proposals or discussion papers from Friends House to guide the Meeting. Whatever comes forth will be ‘as led’ by those present and the moving of...
All articles
The future of Meeting for Sufferings
For some time now we have been putting a lot of time, effort and resources into trying to adapt our organisations, central and local, to demands from without. In doing so, we have been setting up a large number of autonomous charities – locally for Area Meetings (AMs) and centrally for...
Anyone for an Earth testimony?
Yearly Meeting Gathering promises to be full of inspiration – a chance for Friends to share what we are doing to sustain the world we live in, and to consider new leadings. It is much needed at a time when the urgency of responding to climate change seems to be forgotten...
Unable, unwilling
Walking the streets of Oxford one dusky evening, I notice a young man hurrying, with shoulders hunched and collar turned up, not wanting to be recognised. A cloth bag hangs limply from his arm and sandals hug his socked feet. He disappears down the road, slipping through the straggling crowds...
Letters - 29 July 2011
Inspired I was inspired by the article by Walter Storey (22 July). I know a pair of unrelated friends in a similar situation. There has been so much in the Friend lately about the nature of God/god, but the paragraph in this piece about Jesus says it all; it is...