Issue 27-05-2016
Featured story
Thought for the Week: The cable car
Many years ago when our two sons were teenagers (they are now in their early sixties!) my late wife Heather and I took them on a camping holiday in Austria. It’s a beautiful country, full of friendly, hospitable people – and I was able to exercise the very ungrammatical German...
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Sea of light
My vision for the garden was formed by the first two lines of a poem by Waldo Williams in the current Quaker faith & practice 21.33: Where did the sea of light roll from Onto Flower Meadow Field and Flower Field? It seems to me that this quote encapsulates the essence...
The Swarthmore Lecture: Mending broken hearts
They have been actively involved in Quaker peacebuilding work in the region for many years. Cécile and Esther talked about their lives and witness to Ann Floyd and Harry Albright, two members of the committee appointed to oversee the Lecture. It is only the fifth time that the Swarthmore...
Family, empire, migrant, refugee.
When the refugee issue hit the headlines last autumn and became a crisis some words rumbled at the back of my mind and took shape in the phrase ‘chickens coming home to roost’. Slowly, I began to articulate, in a fumbling way, a line of connection between those desperate people...
Education Matters!
‘Education Matters!’ was our original 2014 rallying cry, and over fifty Friends came together in Friends House on 30 April 2016 in the same spirit for a conference organised by the Quaker Values in Education group. It was entitled ‘Values in Education’ and examined the subject at three levels: the classroom, the school...
Being a Quaker
When I applied for membership of the Religious Society of Friends, ten years ago or so, it was not because I wanted to become a Quaker. It was because I felt, deep in my core, that I was a Quaker: I was seeking mutual, formal acknowledgement of this between my...
All articles
Europe: Penn and Europe
A century before the Napoleonic wars, and two centuries before the first and second world wars, Quaker William Penn proposed a parliament through which the princes and states of Europe could resolve disputes nonviolently. Penn’s 1693 essay, ‘Towards the present and future peace of Europe’, was the first proposal for...
Europe: Time to leave
I do not believe the advantages gained by being a member of the European Union outweigh its fundamental moral deficiencies and apparently unrepented economic failings. I believe, therefore, that Quakers should support leaving the EU.
On not being called
Yearly Meeting is often a moving experience. This is not, on the whole, due to the quality of the ministry, which, with a few heart-touching exceptions, I usually consider no better than in my own Local Meeting. It is the joint purpose that is felt so powerfully among the hundreds...
Gleanings: Seeking unity
I have been at many different kinds of gathering where, after some days together, we felt a sublime connection and a capacity to change the world. It happens in a particular form at Yearly Meeting: the Light shines, a way opens and some intractable conflict is suddenly resolved. Lis Burch...
Quaker groups unite to oppose TTIP
Five Quaker organisations from Europe and the United States have asked governments to reject the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Swiss Friends consider refugees
‘Out of sight and out of mind? Refugees and us in Switzerland today’ was the theme of Switzerland Yearly Meeting, which took place from 13 to 16 May at Herzberg.
Gathering of Central European Friends
More than thirty Quakers attended the Central European Gathering of Friends in Niwki, near Opole, Poland, between 20 and 23 May.
Clean water for hospital in Congo
Clean water has reached the hospital at Abeka in the Congo, thanks to support that has been given by the Quaker Congo Partnership (QCP).
BYM backs Human Rights Act
Britain Yearly Meeting has added its name to the list of organisations protesting against the repeal of the Human Rights Act.
Change of name
Friends’ School Saffron Walden will be known as Walden School from 1 September 2016.
From the archive: Protest and punishment
At the end of 1915 the Friend gave up its ‘Day by Day’ feature, which reported national and international news. Thereafter news featured in its pages only as it was seen to affect Friends. The Easter Rising An extension of the new Military Service Act in May 1916, calling up married men...
Letters - 27 May 2016
Where love and truth cohere I am grateful to Rachel Britton for her article (20 May). It is right that we should struggle with words in order to broaden our understanding, but too often words divide, sometimes because we make assumptions about what others mean by a word rather than a...