Issue 15-07-2016
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Practising peace
I have a confession to make: I’m reluctant to wear a ‘Quakers for Peace’ badge. Like ‘god’, peace means different things to different people. To some, it is avoiding or burying differences; to others, making things right after conflict; for some a state of perpetual (and probably unachievable) harmony;...
Top stories
Spiritual truth and business method
Spiritual truth is not like maths and physics, where we have a universal language precisely defined and understood in the same way around the globe ‘from Tokyo to Timbuktu’. I respect the efforts of theologians and of the many Quakers quoted in our Book of Discipline to say clearly what...
Inspiration at The Pales
As clerk for Southern Marches Area Meeting for some time now, it is with regret that I attend the Meeting of Friends in Wales so infrequently. Southern Marches has a split personality, so to speak, with three Meetings in Wales and others in Herefordshire and Shropshire. This dichotomy is such...
Justice and kindness
Friends met at The Pales, originally a burial ground for Friends in the seventeenth century, since they could not be buried in churchyards. Today there is a Meeting house there (built in 1717) and a cottage with grounds, as well as the burial ground, which carries the footprints of Quaker persecution...
Disarming the argument
Tim Wallis says of his book, The Truth About Trident: Disarming the Nuclear Argument, that in one sense the book took three months to write, but in another sense it took thirty years. How so? It draws indirectly on his lifetime in peace work.
Health outcomes
At Yearly Meeting it was difficult to choose between the various events held during lunch breaks. I am so glad to have attended the session run by a retired GP, Sylvia Melville, from Banbury & Evesham Area Meeting, on the effects of government policy on the National Health Service (NHS).
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Kenyan Friend crosses continents
Robert Wafula, principal of Friends Theological College in Kaimosi, Kenya, has spent three weeks in Britain Yearly Meeting, spending time with Friends and visiting places significant to Quakers.
Friends at opening of Scottish parliament
Pamala McDougall, the representative Friend of General Meeting for Scotland, attended the Kirking of the Scottish parliament on 12 May and the official opening of the fifth session on 2 July.
Science Museum event prompts protests
Friends were among those outside the Science Museum in London on 11 July, protesting at its involvement with the Farnborough International Airshow 2016.
Liverpool Friends promote sanctuary
Liverpool Meeting House was the setting for a City of Sanctuary fair on Saturday 9 July. The event featured sixteen organisations ranging from Christian Aid to a local Congolese Association. It was designed to ‘bring people together to share work, gain new ideas, offer help, pledge support and ask questions’, the...
Quaker sampler returns to Ireland
A sampler stitched by an Irish Quaker more than two centuries ago has found its way ‘home’ from Australia.
Civic roles for York Friends
For the first time in York’s history the mayoral party is from the Green Party, and three local Quakers are among those involved.
Friends school gathering
Seventeen students from five Quaker schools attended the annual Friends Schools Gathering at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham.
Revitalising the planet
New Milton Meeting has spent time on how we might be able to ameliorate the current immigration crisis. We opened our meeting with a quotation from Quaker faith & practice 23.36: At the centre of Friends’ religious experience is the repeatedly and consistently expressed belief in the fundamental equality of all...
Eye - 15 July 2016
Celebrating summer Leaves, flowers, berries, buttons and strips of ribbon and wool came together in an all age activity that delighted the senses at a recent Area Meeting. A group mandala was created by Friends at Mid-Somerset Area Meeting in June. Marilyn Upton explained: ‘The word “mandala” is Sanskrit. Loosely...
Letters - 15 July 2016
From here to where In her heartfelt article (8 July) Diana Sandy asks if spirituality is a delusion because, she is told, ‘everything happens in the human brain’. This resonated with me, because a friend recently discounted one of my peak experiences as ‘just electrical activity in your brain’. It felt...