Issue 05-02-2016
Featured story
Thought for the Week: The discipleship deal
I am working my way through the Sermon on the Mount. Whenever I’ve thought about my relationship with Jesus in the past I’ve always turned to the Sermon on the Mount, regarding it as the best blueprint for living that I’ve ever encountered and deciding that I...
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William Penn: Spiritual practice
There is something in the writings of the early Friends that speaks to my condition. It is a joy to feel that connection to those first Quakers. From the Pendle Hill pamphlet 167 about William Penn: mystic Elizabeth Gray Vining offers the following quote from A Tender Visitation in the Love...
Area Meetings: what is the future?
Our Friend, Ian Beeson speaks to my condition (1 January) and the thoughts I have been having since reading the report of Meeting for Sufferings 11 December 2015. This is what the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) says about itself: ‘The principal activity of [an] Area Quaker Meeting is the arrangement and holding...
Friends mark major centenary
The work by Quakers to ensure recognition of the right to refuse to kill was marked at Westminster last week on the centenary of the passing of the Military Service Act in 1916. An event was held in the Atlee Suite at Portcullis House beside the House of Commons on Wednesday 27...
Skipton Friends celebrate centenary of peace congress
A special event took place at the Friends Meeting House in Skipton, North Yorkshire, on 27 January to remember the International Congress of Women that was held in The Hague in 1915 as a response to the carnage of world war one.
Friends in Hastings: 150 years of worship
Quakers in Hastings in Sussex recently marked the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the opening of their Meeting house with a celebration on 25 January.
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Sanctions rather than war
It was splendid news that the agreement reached last year with Iran (for international inspections to check that the country’s nuclear capability was not being used to produce nuclear weapons) was confirmed. What is even better, it was achieved by the use of sanctions rather than warfare. Now a...
In the name of God?
In the year 1600 the Medieval church hammered a spike through the tongue of the Franciscan astronomer Giordano Bruno before burning him to death at the stake. So, what was Giordano’s ‘crime’? He simply said: ‘There are many more worlds other than this one.’ The Hubble telescope has recently discovered 10,000...
What lies beyond
Friends might be excused for being somewhat quizzical about Derek Guiton’s choice of title for his recent book A Man that Looks on Glass, which was reviewed in The Friend on 27 November, as its meaning is not immediately obvious. The reviewer mentions that the wording is taken from a...
Meaning and life
Recently a friend of mine made the observation that ‘Life is hard’. I did not ask why she had said what she did, but it was hardly necessary. Whether we look at the world around us or within our own personal experiences we find an abundance of evidence to support...
Letters - 05 February 2016
Ex-offenders and Meetings If our Meetings are open to all, but then we say ‘… except ex-offenders’, I wonder what our testimony to equality really means? When we assert that ‘Every human being is unique, precious, a child of God’, in honesty should we be adding ‘but some are more human...