Issue 17-11-2017
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Thought for the Week: Language and diversity
Reading or hearing the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) always depresses me: ‘There was a time when all the world spoke a single language and used the same words.’ These words represent a monotonic planet projecting a colourless, tuneless and utterly lifeless existence, bound by a uniformity...
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Voices from Wales
There was a place – a special place. Down the uneven, breakneck stone steps from the cottage, through the bottom gate, there was a small paddock on the bank of the River Aeron, shaded by a vast old ash and an equally old Norwegian spruce. We put a wooden and wrought...
Happy birthday
It doesn’t rain cats and dogs in Welsh. It rains old wives and walking sticks (‘bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn’). It was doing just that on 21 October as everything was being cleared away. Meeting of Friends in Wales (MFW) had met in Newtown/Y Drenewydd and there marked twenty-five...
A Oes Heddwch?
At the main literature awards ceremonies at the National Eisteddfod of Wales each year an interesting ritual takes place. The winning author is led to the stage where he or she stands waiting for their name to be proclaimed. Two druids hold a sheathed sword above the winner’s head,...
Finding hope
I have been in HMP Berwyn since 23 March 2017 and, to be honest, it’s been an emotional roller coaster for me to get to this frame of mind, and to be able to be happy and content, while from the outside looking in you would think I was constantly carrying...
Work and worship
I remember vividly the first Meeting of Friends in Wales held in 1992, in Llanwrtyd, just across the mountain from me. It was experimental, it was new, but it had a clear role to play on behalf of Friends throughout Wales. I wanted to be involved! Ever since then I have...
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Friends on the inside
It is Monday afternoon and here we are again, sitting in a circle of silence, waiting. Some of us find it easier to wait than others. It’s only twenty minutes, but to some of us it’s like twenty years.
…ac ’roedd yno freuddwyd / …and there was a dream
…ac ’roedd yno freuddwyd ’Roedd yno freuddwyd, yn llechu rhwng plygiadau tawelwch y cyrddau; dyhead am gael adnabod Cyfeillion o bedwar ban, dyhead am gael cyfrannu, fel Cyfeillion, i fywyd ein darn tir. Am gael gwneud hynny pe mynnem yn ein hiaith ein hunain. Am gael adnabod ein gilydd mewn...
Song of the small birds
Splitting up the land came first, then splitting the coal for the warmth it brings. But splitting the blue air is the worst, ripping the breath from living things.
Quaker presence at climate conference in Bonn
Quakers attended the UN Climate Change Conference (COP23) that took place from 6 to 17 November in Bonn, Germany. The nations of the world gathered with the aim of moving forward on the ambitions of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Syria signed the Agreement during COP23, leaving the US as the only country that...
Pickering Meeting hosts sustainability lecture
Pickering Meeting in Yorkshire recently hosted the fourth lecture since the Meeting and four other local churches were gifted a sum of money following the closure ten years ago of the town’s Good News Bookshop.
Eye - 17 November 2017
Joyful puppetry Skipton Friends made a joyful outing during the town’s Puppet Festival Parade this year. A giant Quaker octopus was crafted by the Meeting, inspired by the parade’s theme ‘Dreams of the Sea’, and took to the streets on Sunday 1 October.
Letters - 17 November 2017
The Bible Society Quakers were present at the inaugural meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804 and continued to be associated with it throughout the nineteenth century. Josiah Forster, who was Yearly Meeting clerk for a time, served on its committee for forty-four years, some of these as...