Issue 19-09-2014
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Different but not divided
By now, the result of the historic referendum will be known. It has been an intoxicating period in Scotland, with an intense debate across the country about what kind of vision of the future those living here want. This has proved to be more expansive, more inclusive and more egalitarian...
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Turning the Tide
Turning the Tide (TTT) is a Quaker Peace & Social Witness programme. It supports groups working for social justice and equality to understand and use nonviolent methods in achieving social change. It runs workshops, offers bespoke campaigning support and has a website and online training materials. Many requests are about...
Quaker memorial opened in Waterford
Waterford’s Quaker heritage has been acknowledged in the official opening of the city’s Quaker memorial. The memorial, funded by the local council, is on the site of the first Quaker Burial Ground in Waterford, in John’s Lane. Its official opening, two years after completion, was scheduled to...
Kingston Quaker Centre formally opened
Local MPs Ed Davey and Vince Cable were among those who attended the formal opening of the Kingston Quaker Centre on 6 September. The decision to create a new Quaker Centre was made in the late 1990s and the present design is the third one to have been produced in that...
Young Quakers explore equality
Sixty-seven young Quakers, aged from eleven to fourteen, took part in this year’s Friends Southern Summer Event (FSSE) summer school, held at Friends’ School Saffron Walden from 16 to 23 August. The young Friends worked with twenty-three staff volunteers to explore the theme of ‘Equality and Inequality’.
Barbarity or heroism?
Each day there are reports of alarm and atrocity. We are being asked almost daily to seek out those amongst us whose lifestyle, culture or views are unfamiliar and inimical to us. We are asked to condemn these people as demons. These are people we have not met and cannot...
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Australian Quakers mark war centenary
Australian dissent and opposition to the first world war was highlighted at an exhibition in Sydney. ‘World War 1: Quaker witness to peace and non-violence’ ran from 6 to 14 September at the Devonshire Street Meeting House, as part of New South Wales (NSW) History Week.
New appointments at JRCT
The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT) has announced the appointment of seven new co-optees to its grant committees. Avila Kilmurray, former director of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, has joined JRCT’s Ireland committee.
Change and transition
My first impression of Yearly Meeting Gathering (YMG) 2014 in Bath was of a building site. We were thinking about the transition to being Quaker. A building site is a place in transformation from one state to another. Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) is a spiritual building site. Since my first one...
Stop the World!
Deadline: 12.30pm British Standard Time. Pat had arrived with ten minutes to spare from the other side of the Pennines, caught up behind infuriatingly slow agricultural machinery. We just had time to scoff a couple of oatcakes with peanut butter, make a drink and get upstairs to the computer. Two...
Squaring the Circle
The Friends Therapeutic Community Trust approaches its fiftieth birthday. The Trust has run a residential therapeutic community for older teenage boys since 1969. This project – Glebe House – works intensively with approximately thirteen young men at any one time. These young men stay for two years and during that time have an...
Growing in the Spirit
Sixty years ago I worked at The Retreat, the pioneering Quaker mental hospital in my home town of York. I was about to start medical school and this was a holiday job as an orderly. It was wonderful. I shall never forget the peanut butter sandwiches we ate during break...
Classic lasagne
Firstly, make the meat sauce warning: this may disturb the supersensitive mask your eyes, muffle your ears bodies explode from planes wars always mangle us indiscriminately life is just like that
Eye - 19 September 2014
Feathered attenders How do you get families to come to Meeting? Andrew Backhouse got in touch with Eye to show Wilmslow Meeting’s unusual approach: ‘We have a few children who come fairly irregularly but one parent has already brought a baby owl to Meeting, and offered to bring six...
Letters - 19 September 2014
Scottish referendum Nigel Dower (12 September) sees a deal to keep Trident in Scotland as a certainty. This does seem unduly pessimistic, although, obviously, the pressures to get this outcome are very great. I would expect a Scottish government to be persistent enough to make the champions of nuclear weapons fatigued...