Issue 14-07-2017
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Community together
When intolerance, hate crime and anti-Semitism raised its head in 2016, Disley Quakers felt led to figure out what they could do in the community to stand against it. We wanted to build bridges with people we didn’t know. We had contacts with some of the churches and the Womenâ€...
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A welcome at Woodbrooke
We know that many people have been influenced by their connections with Woodbrooke over the years, and we are deeply grateful that Woodbrooke is held in such high regard. We want to begin by reassuring Friends that Quakerism runs through our organisation as strongly as it has ever done and...
I don’t want to be good
I don’t want to be good. It’s the trying I find difficult. Whenever I have tried to be good in the past it has never ended well. What’s worse, the more I try, the more I find myself tempted to give up and go back to not...
Location
Historically, Quaker Meetings were formed and Meeting houses built or established by groups of Friends for worship together and mutual support. They were obviously located close to where the Friends lived and very likely where they also worked.
Beyond terrorism
After every terrorist attack, the media are flooded with experts trying to rationalise events. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ ‘How can we understand them?’ ‘How were they radicalised?’ ‘Is it connected with Islam?’ ‘What can we do to prevent more attacks?’
Christian beginnings
Geza Vermes, who died aged eighty-eight in 2013, was probably the greatest Jesus scholar of his time. The last book published in his lifetime, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicea, AD 30-325, summarises his view of the historical Jesus the Jew, preaching to Jews, not gentiles as scholars such as E...
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Nuclear weapons ban treaty adopted
Quaker observers hailed the adoption last week of a United Nations treaty aimed at ridding the world of nuclear weapons as a huge step.
QUNO presence at African youth peace event
Quaker United Nations Office’s (QUNO) representative for peacebuilding, Megan Schmidt, participated in a Dialogue and Exchange Programme (DEP) on the role of young people in the prevention of electoral violence, held in Nairobi, Kenya from 29 June to 1 July.
Quakers Uniting in Publications annual meeting
Quakers Uniting in Publications (QUIP) held its annual meeting in March at the Penn Center on Saint Helena Island in South Carolina, USA, with the theme ‘Are Quakers Still Publishers of Truth?’
Change against chains at Bootham School
Students at Bootham School in York have collected £1,100 in loose change to help break the chains of modern day slavery.
Fracking opposed in Lancashire
A YouGov survey of Lancashire residents for Friends of the Earth reveals that sixty-six per cent are opposed to fracking within five miles of where they live and fifty-four per cent said that they thought fracking was unsafe.
Child’s treatment in prison declared unlawful
A boy who was isolated in his cell for months on end in a London prison was treated unlawfully because he was denied sufficient access to education, the High Court ruled on 4 July. As reported in the Friend on 17 March, the boy spent more than 100 days isolated from his peers...
Holiday or trespass
We pay our pot of gold To reach the sun But not the rainbow’s end There is no rain.
Eye - 14 July 2017
Quaker collection catalogued A Friend’s bequest of Quaker books and printed ephemera has been catalogued and made available in the Rare Books Department of Cambridge University Library. David Hall (1947-2015) was former deputy librarian at the University Library and a collector of books on Quaker history. In 2016 material from...
Letters - 14 July 2017
Squeezing out the Spirit? It seems to me that Stephen Feltham’s recent article (30 June) is the most important one the Friend has published for some time. But I think that he is worrying unnecessarily. Politics is, after all, about finding the best way to order relations between members of...