Issue 16-12-2016
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Fear or hope
In December 1916 Britain faced a third Christmas of conflict. The war had not been ‘over by Christmas’ 1914 – as young volunteers had been told in the autumn of that year. Technological progress had improved the lives of millions in the nineteenth century. Two years of war and the huge loss of...
Top stories
The Lollards
When listening to the story of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, I have often wondered where his convincement came from. How could he be so certain, I asked myself? The notion that George Fox had an idea, sprang up and set forth on his travelling in ministry always made...
The life well spoken
When a person you know and respect writes an authentic autobiography, which touches on aspects of your own life journey, almost every page holds some fascination that brings both enjoyment and challenge. This is my experience of Brian Brown’s Born to be Free – The indivisibility of Freedom, subtitled A...
A Christmas Day
To have had one is barrier-leaping, to have had two is beginning to be a custom, but to have had three major musical premieres performed in London’s Royal Festival Hall is surely a rarity to be recognised. Such are the unique gifts of Quaker composer Tony Biggin. Following performances...
Through a glass darkly
In 2015 Derek Guiton published a book entitled A Man that Looks on Glass. It highlighted what he felt was ‘a crisis in British Quakerism’ – a ‘growing secularisation’ within the Religious Society of Friends. There were two movements and they represented competing and ‘incompatible belief systems’. A group of nonthesists were...
The hand of friendship
Picture a small car park on top of a hill near Montgomery Castle in Powys. The trees are in glorious autumn colours, the sunlight filtering through. A woman from Morocco with two small children is waiting as the Quaker ‘reception committee’ arrives. The children hide shyly behind their mother.
All articles
Creating a true peace
When I came to Woking in 1999 the first group I joined was the Woking Community Play Association, a group that writes and stages dramas about the local community. After some years I became chair and we decided we wanted to do a play about the Ockenden Venture, a refugee charity...
EAPPI representative detained and deported
Isabel Apawo Phiri, the World Council of Churches (WCC) associate general secretary, has been interrogated and refused entry to Israel while on a programme supported by British and Irish Quakers.
Wanstead statement on gender diversity
Wanstead Meeting have issued a statement on gender diversity for the wider Quaker community.
Poetry anthology launched
A new anthology of poetry supported by Friends was launched in Macclesfield on 29 November.
Games man honoured
David Parlett of Croydon Meeting in London has been appointed visiting professor of Games Design at the University of Suffolk.
Meeting for Sufferings: Visioning a criminal justice system
Meeting for Sufferings, at Friends House on 3 December, gave consideration to minutes from Area Meetings regarding the Vision for a Criminal Justice System paper first received by Sufferings in April.
Meeting for Sufferings: Working more effectively together
The last item on the agenda of Meeting for Sufferings saw a challenge presented to Friends. Jocelyn Burnell, who is co-clerk of Quaker Life Central Committee (QLCC), spoke to the Committee’s report and highlighted how, in the past year, members of QLCC have been working hard on a ‘root...
Eye - 16 December 2016
For the love of chocolate George Cadbury’s great-great-grandson has founded a company that produces organic, fairly traded, chocolate bars in the UK and delivers through the post.
Letters - 16 December 2016
The ‘Dibleyfication’ of British Quakers We didn’t intend it, and probably didn’t even notice it happening, but haven’t our meetings turned into close cousins of The Vicar of Dibley, where the men sit in secret dour conclave in the property committee, while the women take on the...