Issue 08-05-2015

Featured story

Thought for the Week: Britain Yearly Meeting 2015 Epistle

FREE 7 May 2015 | by Britain Yearly Meeting

Loving Greetings to Friends everywhere, We have come together with joy, seeing one another’s faces and hearing one another more clearly in our new light-filled Meeting house. We have begun a three-year exploration on how we live out our faith in the world. At this particular time with its...

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Top stories

Living out our faith

FREE 7 May 2015 | by Ian Kirk-Smith

A renewed commitment to address the root causes of social and economic injustice in the world and to take action, individually and collectively, prompted by a spirit of love, was at the heart of Britain Yearly Meeting 2015. The annual gathering of Friends was held for the first time in the...

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Britain Yearly Meeting 2015

7 May 2015 | by Reporting by Tara Craig, Roland Carn, Elinor Smallman and Ian Kirk-Smith

Diana Francis after delivering the Swarthmore Lecture. | Photo: Trish Carn.

Swarthmore Lecture 2015 The 2015 Swarthmore Lecture, entitled Faith, power and peace, was given by the peace campaigner Diana Francis on Saturday evening to over 1,000 people in the Large Meeting House. In a very personal and inspiring lecture, she considered the Quaker Peace Testimony in relation to the current global context and...

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Britain Yearly Meeting 2015: Special interest groups

7 May 2015 | by Reporting by Tara Craig, Roland Carn, Elinor Smallman and Ian Kirk-Smith

Interfaith visitors at Yearly Meeting. | Photo: Trish Carn and Anne van Staveren.

Interfaith visitors at BYM Bishop Paul Hendricks of the Roman Catholic Church (left) and Aliya Azam (centre), one of the Muslim presidents of the Christian Muslim Forum, spoke about their work together. David Shreeve (right), environmental advisor to Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, spoke on his environmental work. Some flair...

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Britain Yearly Meeting 2015: Children and young people

7 May 2015 | by Elinor Smallman

The Young People's Programme with community art letters spelling out 'Quakers'. | Photo: Courtesy of the Young People’s Programme.

A hundred and thirty children and young people took part in programmes for under-eighteens at Yearly Meeting. They reflected on inequality and injustice through a range of creative and engaging activities. Forty-seven children – ranging from New Shoots, aged under-two, to Spiritual Adventurers, aged seven to eleven – considered: ‘Is it fair?’ ...

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Britain Yearly Meeting 2015: Faith and action

7 May 2015 | by Elinor Smallman

‘La Patrie’ by Christopher R W Nevinson. | Photo: © Birmingham Museum Trusts.

Find work that wants doing; take it; regularise it later if you can Friends Ambulance Unit motto One of the highlights of Yearly Meeting for some Friends was the presidential address by Betty Hagglund to the Friends Historical Society on Sunday 3 May. It featured archival material from the ‘Faith &...

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Britain Yearly Meeting 2015 in photographs

7 May 2015 | by Trish Carn, Junior Yearly Meeting and Anne van Staveren

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Trade deals: realistic concerns or rabble-rousing?

7 May 2015 | by Tara Craig

Jude Kirton-Darling, a Quaker, MEP and long-time labour activist, began the 2015 Salter Lecture by telling listeners to look ‘right at the centre of the struggle for social and economic justice’. There, she said, they would find the debate around the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

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When the earth moves

7 May 2015 | by Tracey Martin

At 11.45am on Saturday 25 April the earth literally moved under my feet and continued to move for about four minutes. It seemed much longer. I was in Lalitpur over the river from Kathmandu, just fifty metres from Patan Durbar Square, where brick temples collapsed in heaps burying locals and tourists.

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