Issue 03-08-2018
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Being a peacemaker
The city of Coventry is delighted to be preparing to be the UK City of Culture 2021. Coventry is known internationally, too, as a City of Peace and Reconciliation and it’s also a City of Sanctuary, welcoming refugees and asylum seekers. Here, in Coventry, as in localities throughout the UK...
Top stories
An inspiring day
Wrexham was sunny and very hot when sixty-two Friends gathered in Wrexham Meeting House on 30 June for Meeting of Friends in Wales (MFW). It was possibly the largest number of Friends to come together since MFW was established in 1992 and quite a challenge. There was much collaborative chaos as more...
Music ministry
Paulette Meier is a Friend from Ohio who has been visiting Britain and sharing the wisdom of early Friends through her ‘song chants’. Her ‘music ministry’ involves singing quotations of seventeenth century Friends and her tour in Britain, doing workshops with Friends, took her to Swarthmoor Hall, Woodbrooke, Oxford Meeting,...
Home
There was an Old Man with a beard, Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! – Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren, Have all built their nests in my beard.’ Have you ever built a nest or a den – maybe in a secret corner behind the...
Polyamorous Quakers
A search for ‘polyamory’ in the Friend finds two references, both in discussions about non-mainstream sexuality, but neither with discussion on a Quaker perspective. As a polyamorous Quaker I felt compelled to write this article after reflecting on how Quaker values of peace and equality and polyamorous values of non-competition...
Quaker MEP calls for ‘People’s Vote’
Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP and Quaker, has called for a ‘People’s Vote’ on the final Brexit deal between the UK and the EU.
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Solidarity with cycling Friends
Friends have been coming together in solidarity with Quakers who are currently cycling through Britain to London as an act of witness over their concerns for the welfare state in a ‘Ride for Equality and the Common Good’.
Bolton Friends join walk for interfaith unity
Several Bolton Friends took part in a ‘Community Walk’ in Bolton last month as witness to interfaith unity.
Quaker gives ‘Thought for the Day’
A Friend has spoken about Quakers and peacemaking on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’.
Hitchin Meeting adds ‘Peace Table’ to Peace Garden
Friends from Hitchin Meeting are celebrating a new ‘Peace Table’ as the latest addition to their Quaker Peace Garden. The picnic table (with attached benches) was donated by North Hertfordshire Interfaith Forum, with a grant from North Hertfordshire District Council.
FWCC ‘Living the Change’
Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) has joined a new project involving a global community of religious and spiritual institutions to champion sustainable living.
Twentieth anniversary reprint
Heaven on Earth: Quakers and the Second Coming, first published in 1998, has been reprinted as a twentieth anniversary edition.
Correction
In the 13 July edition of the Friend the story ‘March against Donald Trump visit’ contained a mistake. The sentence ‘A Quaker contingent to the main “Stop Trump” demonstration met at Friends House on 13 July and marched from Portland Place to Trafalgar Square’ should have read ‘Some Friends are gathering in...
Priesthood
Friends often refer to the idea of ‘the priesthood of all believers’, but what exactly do we mean by the term? ‘Priest’ literally comes from the Greek word presbyteros, meaning one who is older, whence the office of ‘elder’, a title predicated on the notion that one who is older...
Hemel Hempstead tercentenary
Hemel Hempstead Local Quaker Meeting is celebrating its tercentenary this year. So far, it has proved to be an invigorating and exciting year with, inevitably, a great deal of looking back. In this celebratory year, we have thirty members and five attenders listed in our Meeting.
A negotiator’s toolkit
As floods, droughts and wildfires can neither be ignored nor rationally explained away, government departments – in every country – require ‘concise arguments for urgent climate action’.
Letters - 3 August 2018
Mined for peace of mind Random thoughts have brought me to the passing but persistent influence of three people in my life, whose own lives were full of a sustaining and rich interior strength. Towards the end of their lives two of these lived in Yorkshire and one in Cornwall....