Issue 07-08-2015
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Seventy years ago
8:16 am 6 August 1945 American pilots dropped the world’s first atom bomb on Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were killed as a direct result of the explosion. At least 60,000 more were dead by the end of the year. Many of those who survived suffered long-term illness and disability from the radiation, including cancers,...
Top stories
On poppies, wreaths and oak trees
Witney Quakers do not have a Meeting house of their own and since 1997, when the Meeting restarted, we have gathered in seven different venues. One of these was the Gallery Room of the Witney Corn Exchange, which overlooks the market square. On Remembrance Sunday each November the various participating groups...
Inside Out/Outside In
The exhibition ‘Inside Out/Outside In’, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, brings together a collaborative exhibition of three Quaker artists. We come from multi-faith backgrounds, namely Jewish, Hindu and Christian. For the three of us in this exhibition, our creative practice uses the figure as a vehicle both metaphorically and...
Call to adventure
Looking around the circle of Friends in Meeting for Worship, I am conscious of the diversity of our journeys. Most of us are probably in the second half of our lives; we have had jobs, perhaps careers, children, marriages, divorces and bereavements. We may have found a sense of purpose;...
No more fudges
A momentous debate in parliament is likely to be held this autumn, according to comments trailed by David Cameron, the prime minister, and Michael Fallon, secretary of state for defence. The British people will be invited to go to war again in the Middle East. We have been quietly involved...
First Irish Quaker celebrated
Eighty Friends were among close to five hundred people who travelled to Mountmellick, Ireland, last week for the William Edmundson Homecoming. The week-long celebration was organised by Mountmellick Heritage Society to commemorate the life of the Englishman and Friend, who came to be known as the ‘Irish Hammer’.
All articles
Quaker Tapestry reaches out
The Quaker Tapestry is on the road again – for the fifteenth successive year – travelling to Northern Ireland for the first time. The 2015 roadshow will appear in Scotland first, at New Lanark Mills World Heritage Site in August, and then in September visit Northern Ireland where it will be on display...
Film fans appreciate Quaker silence
Waiting & Silence, a short film showing a Meeting for Worship, was screened at the Aperture Festival at the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland last week. The film was made by Corrymeela community member, and Quaker, Paul Hutchinson, and shot at Coleraine Meeting House.
Service in the spotlight
An exhibition on ‘Quaker Service’ has opened at Peckover House, a National Trust property in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. It tells ‘how the work of Friends goes on, bringing relief to war-torn areas, or to any region where aid or repatriation is needed’, according to the National Trust.
QSA funeral work makes award shortlist
Quaker Social Action (QSA)’s ‘Down to Earth’ campaign has been shortlisted for a prestigious Third Sector Award. The funeral poverty project is competing for the Breakthrough of the Year award. It is up against significantly larger charities, including Cancer Research UK and the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative.
Friend greets Mennonites
Gretchen Castle, general secretary of the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), offered ecumenical greetings at the recent Mennonite World Conference global assembly in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Friends tread ancient paths
Labyrinths were at the centre of a recent course at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham.
Working for peace
The ‘Friends of Nature House’, a hostel set in lovely wooded country near the university city of Wageningen, was the venue for Netherlands Yearly Meeting 2015, which took place over the weekend of 29-31 May and attracted around eighty Friends and guests. We are living in challenging times. The cuts to...
Historical relics
Burning books is agreed to be an outrage. Books are the repository of the history and culture of the forebears of a people and are revered as the representation of shared experience and shared values. Thus, the deliberate destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, the burning of English translations...
Inequality: What can be done?
Professor Anthony Atkinson is the author of a hefty new volume called Inequality: What can be done? The book is well known to many politicians and many more economists throughout Europe and America. I suspect that it is already an irritant to a certain class of politician. It is interesting...
Being
Dissolve into the Wholeness, And in time Let the Wholeness Bring you together, And together live. What is there to give That is not already given? Your life is processing The Wholeness, Being a form of flow, Of taking in from the Whole, And letting it pass through The space...
Letters - 7 August 2015
Gandhi and nonviolence I would like to take up Leslie Merton’s point (24 July) about Gandhi and nonviolence; in particular, the aim of ‘not even a violent thought’. In principle this might be possible, but the effort to banish even a single violent thought might have unfortunate consequences. I remember...