Issue 04-03-2016
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Grace-full Quakers
Who can you call to mind that has grace? What is this elusive quality exhibited unconsciously by some, and seemingly completely missing in others?
Top stories
Drugs: a contentious issue
Cornwall Area Meeting circulated a Minute regarding this concern to Area Meeting clerks in 2001 and 2015. We have received a number of responses: some Area Meetings support us and some Area Meetings and individuals have been good enough to communicate with us to let us know why they disagree with our...
Laurence Lerner
In its leaning on language, poetry can only be written by someone with a feel for the power of words, yet paradoxically it’s an attempt to shake free of words and find the ‘thisness’ of experience, the underlying actuality that words are a way of capturing. How obvious it...
The deep pit
I am privileged to hear some people’s accounts of the experience of depression, and often the metaphors they use are intensely moving.
Friends join ‘biggest in a generation’ Trident action
Several groups of Quakers were among an estimated twenty thousand people in central London who protested against government plans to renew the Trident missile system.
BFI backing helps The Divide to cinematic release
A British Film Institute (BFI) award is helping to bring The Divide, a documentary looking at inequality, to cinemas across the United Kingdom. The BFI’s ‘New Models’ distribution award ‘supports experimental and ambitious release models, and creative marketing strategies that seek to exploit new opportunities outside traditional theatrical and...
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Friend sentenced for Heathrow action
Sam Sender of Ealing Meeting has been sentenced over his involvement in a peaceful protest with the pressure group Plane Stupid.
Peace Hub workshop highlights anti-austerity measures
More than sixty people visited the Central England Quakers project the Peace Hub in Birmingham on 18 February for a workshop entitled ‘Anti-austerity, but Pro What?’
Friends urge change on the visit of armed forces to schools
Quakers in Scotland have joined with the charity ForcesWatch in appealing to the Scottish government to ensure greater scrutiny, guidance and consultation with parents and guardians on armed forces visits to schools in Scotland.
Sustainability gathering registration speeds up
Registration for Britain Yearly Meeting’s forthcoming sustainability gathering has gathered momentum following a plea at Meeting for Sufferings.
Ethical Landlords Association
A new initiative has been established that aims to improve standards of management of private rented housing in the UK — the Ethical Landlords Association (ELA), which is supported by Quaker Housing Trust.
Fair funeral coup for QSA
Quaker Social Action (QSA) is celebrating the biggest commitment that has so far been given to its Fair Funerals pledge.
Plane Stupid
While I have sympathy with the sincerity of the Plane Stupid demonstrators at Heathrow last July, who have now been given suspended sentences, I also have misgivings. The blockade caused twenty-five flights to be cancelled and dozens delayed. Inevitably, hundreds of passengers were inconvenienced and Plane Stupid cannot have known...
Facing the end
We are in the visiting room at Florida State Prison. Mike Lambrix, condemned to death, on one side, holding court behind glass and speaking through a small disc with slots. On the other side six of us: his mother, stepfather, daughter, two sisters and me. A constant stream of family...
Where is the Spirit?
Never having spent more than a day in a hospital it came as a shock to the system to be wheeled into Critical Care at West Suffolk Hospital and then transferred to Papworth Hospital for heart surgery. For nigh on five weeks I had to lie at the tender mercy...
Eye - 04 March 2016
Excitement at Bull Street Friends at Bull Street Meeting House in Birmingham were treated to an unusual sight as 2015 drew to a close. For the first time in over sixty years, trams have been trundling past the Meeting house (see right). Twenty-one trams, each holding up to 208 people, make up...
Letters - 04 March 2016
Quaker worship Quaker silent worship often falls into the third state of mind, which is neither awake nor asleep. Hypnotherapists know this as trance – a narrowing of the attention and being utterly absorbed, which can vary in quality between light trance and deep trance. Religious experiences in a trance state...