Issue 09-03-2018
Featured story
Thoughts for the Week: A helping hand
The Kindertransport story is widely known. It saved some 10,000 children aged between six and seventeen years of age. The Quaker work with Kindertransport is an important chapter in the history of the Religious Society of Friends and an example of putting faith into action. There were, however, other areas where...
Top stories
Violence against women
What did we learn? What has changed? When we started our support of the ‘16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence’ protest my aim was to raise awareness amongst Quakers. It is a big issue and so many people came out of the woodwork to say ‘Yes’. Glasgow Meeting supported...
How things have changed
My grandmother, Mabel Barlow, was taken on her twenty-first birthday in 1889 on an outing to the Houses of Parliament. Her wonderful account of the experience, as we commemorate the fine work of the suffragettes, shows that feelings of being omitted from the legislative process were apparent even in the nineteenth...
Beyond walls
It is always fascinating to hear a person tell of finding a new and more satisfying direction in life. One delight of Beyond Walls, complied by Suresh Khatri, is that you can dip into it anywhere, and read a profound experience, told in a couple of pages. In this book...
Looking for a touchstone
The Woodbrooke course ‘Quakers and European Politics’, held between 9-11 February, was led by Andrew Lane, director of the Quaker Council for European Affairs office in Brussels (QCEA), and, for me, it had a special importance. I was part of the group calling itself Quakers for Europe that campaigned passionately...
Friends open doors to homeless
Weston-super-Mare Meeting House was in the news last week for opening its doors to homeless people by providing an emergency shelter in the cold weather. Quaker and non-Quaker volunteers served dinner and breakfast to local homeless people from Tuesday night to Sunday night, when the town was besieged with snow.
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Video channel in South Africa
Southern Africa Yearly Meeting (SAYM) has set up a new YouTube channel showing videos of Southern African Friends talking about their Quaker faith. The channel currently consists of eight videos. One Friend says ‘spiritual experience should be the root of all religious life’. Another talks of how Quakers ‘don’t...
Blue Idol Meeting marks William Penn’s death
Blue Idol Quakers are celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of William Penn with a series of events at their historic Meeting house. The tercentenary will be commemorated by monthly events leading up to the date of his death. He died on 30 July 1718.
Exhibition explores war through new eyes
The Peace Museum in Bradford is holding an exhibition this month exploring the aftermath of the first world war from the perspective of German civilians.
Quaker witness recognised by memorial plaque
Newcastle City Council has mounted a memorial plaque to commemorate visits by a leading American abolitionist to the home of the influential Quaker Richardson family. Anti-slave activists Henry, Anna and Ellen Richardson raised £150 in the 1840s to free Frederick Douglass, who was a prominent campaigner for black emancipation and racial...
Friends in France share translation of YM Epistle
Friends in France have released a translation of the France Yearly Meeting Epistle drawn up at their gathering in Carcassonne between 21-24 October 2017. The Epistle celebrates the present strength and identity of Quakers in France and begins: ‘The seed French Quakers have been sowing these last few years regarding their...
American Quakers act on immigration
American Friends are holding a Spring Lobby weekend in Washington on 17-20 March as part of an on-going campaign for a fair immigration system.
Collateral Damage project
Kingston Meeting is hosting a small exhibition of artworks related to peace and white poppies. Linda Murgatroyd, who is involved in the initiative, said: ‘In this centenary year the Collateral Damage project is inviting people to commemorate… victims of war by making a unique white poppy out of some kind...
Bath Quakers celebrate appointment
Bath Meeting House is celebrating the appointment last month of professor David Goode as president of Bath’s Natural History Society.
QUNO deadline
The Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) in Geneva has announced that applications for the next summer school, to take place from 8-20 July 2018, are now open.
The Collateral Damage project
In November 2018 it will be 100 years since the end of the first world war. This war killed over seventeen million people and injured over twenty million others around the world. Sadly, it was not a ‘war to end all wars’. The second world war two saw around sixty million deaths...
Where?
‘Where should the Birds fly after the last Sky?’ Mahmoud Darwish Where does the heart go when it knows the hideous lies spoken, the searing of flesh is everywhere, the ugliness of...
Exploring doubt
The cover of a book does not usually influence me but I admit to being immediately moved by this one. It shows a photograph of a lowering, open sky and the hauntingly bleak, flat marshes of the north Norfolk coastline: wild, wet and wind-swept, beloved of artists, walkers, bird-watchers and...
Eye - 09 March 2018
Quakers in film Quakers featured in Western films of the 1940s and 1950s, starring alongside stars such as Gary Cooper and John Wayne, were among the subjects highlighted at a recent conference in Stoke-on-Trent. Three research projects on Quakers in historical fictions were presented at the third Historical Fictions Research...
Letters - 09 March 2018
Titles The spiritual journey is more important than labels. Are we to give regular attenders a set time before they apply for membership? A person, member or attender is no different. We are all on a spiritual path; we all have faith and commitments to the Society before and after...