Issue 23-02-2018

Featured story

Thought for the Week: The challenge of success

FREE 22 Feb 2018 | by Roger Iredale

The other night our neighbour was found dead beside his bed. Friends and relatives had broken into his house to find him. He was an eccentric, gifted visionary but a lonely character with a history of peaceful protest who had been physically ill for some time. He was downcast by...

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Top stories

Spirituality and Nature

22 Feb 2018 | by Mike King

While on retreat to the Rax mountain range. | Photo: Mike King.

Ben Pink Dandelion, programme leader for the Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies at Woodbrooke and the 2014 Swarthmore lecturer, gave a talk at our Meeting recently. I stood up to make a comment, introducing myself as both a Quaker and an animist. I had greatly enjoyed his presentation and I told...

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Interfaith in rural Scotland

22 Feb 2018 | by Jan Lethbridge

A close-up of the wallhanging produced at the celebration hosted by the DGMA International Women's Group. | Photo: Courtesy of Jan Lethbridge.

It isn’t often that I wish I lived in a city, but whenever I read of, hear of, or attend interfaith gatherings in Glasgow or Edinburgh I do wish such opportunities were available to me locally in Dumfries and Galloway. The Dumfries interfaith group basically consists of two of...

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Quakers and gender

22 Feb 2018 | by Abigail Maxwell

‘Cis-heteronormativity’ is the state where being ‘cisgendered’ – never questioning your gender and heterosexuality – is normal, and society is made to fit cisgendered, heterosexual people’s expectations, ways of being and desires.

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Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’

22 Feb 2018 | by Mike Tooby

Close- up of Cecil Collins, The Quest, 1938. | Photo: Courtesy of Turner Contemporary.

‘Journeys with “The Waste Land”’ an exhibition I initiated as a curator, has recently opened at the Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate. After six years of planning, it has so far been well attended and received, though inevitably some negative reaction has also come our way. Its starting point...

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From the archive: ...diversities of service but the same Lord (1 Corinthians 12:5)

22 Feb 2018 | by Janet Scott

In the 11 January 1918 edition of the Friend George Cadbury was reported as speaking at a Meeting about the decline in attendance. There was, he said, ‘not a single meeting of the Society of Friends that could be called really successful. We had consulted too much our own comfort and ease.’...

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All articles

The unexamined spiritual life

22 Feb 2018 | by Noël Staples

Two of the most frustrating aspects of mystical spiritual experience are: first, one desires strongly to help others find a way into their own spiritual relationship (with the Divine, God, the Light, Allah); and second, the endeavour is frustrated by the difficulty of articulating anything about one’s own mystical...

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CND at sixty

FREE 22 Feb 2018 | by Rebecca Hardy

Kate Hudson, the general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), has paid tribute to the support of Friends as Quakers up and down the country gear up for the organisation’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations.

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Quaker concern for land reform

FREE 22 Feb 2018 | by Rebecca Hardy

Friends concerned with housing equality have been urged to join a campaign to start a Land Value Tax (LVT). Jocelyn Gaskell, from Yealand Meeting, hopes to start a campaign within British Quakerism.

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FWCC backs pope’s call for day of peace

22 Feb 2018 | by Rebecca Hardy

Friends WorLd Committee for Consultation (FWCC) has urged Quakers to take part in a day of prayer and fasting for peace.

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Art in North London

22 Feb 2018 | by Rebecca Hardy

North London Friends are holding an art exhibition to showcase work that expresses their experience of Quakerism.

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QSA and funeral fund

22 Feb 2018 | by Rebecca Hardy

Quaker Social Action (QSA) has welcomed the new changes to the ‘funeral fund’ announced by the Department for Work and Pensions this month.

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‘Spiral of Violence’

22 Feb 2018 | by Rebecca Hardy

A British Muslim and former Guatanamo Bay detainee gave a talk to Friends in York 22 February reflecting on the issues that perpetuate violence across the world.

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Meeting for Sufferings: the work of Quaker Life

22 Feb 2018 | by Rebecca Hardy

The Quaker Life Central Committee (QLCC) reported to Meeting for Sufferings, held at Friends House on 3 February, some of the work that Quaker Life has been involved in this year.

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Letters - 23 February 2018

22 Feb 2018 | by The Friend

Young Quakers The article on ‘elderly Quakerism’ (9 February) was well intentioned, but missed the real nature of the exclusion some under the age of thirty-five feel from British Quakerism. In the October 2017 issue of The Young Quaker, the magazine of the Young Adult Quaker community, Young Friends themselves explored this...

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