Issue 12-10-2018
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Thought for the Week: Progress and civilisation
In early 1930, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian writer, was in Birmingham, staying at the Woodbrooke Settlement at Selly Oak, where he gave an address entitled ‘Civilisation and Progress’. At this event, he said: ‘We in India have for more than a century been dragged by the prosperous West...
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A sympathetic hearing
Our shared concern is about Friends who have difficulties hearing spoken ministry during Meeting for Worship. One of us has long-standing hearing difficulties and has talked informally with many Friends who experience similar problems; the other has worked for several years with profoundly Deaf people. We have offered some information,...
Threads of hope
We believe as Quakers that our faith is expressed through action. For me, the discovery of how I might express my faith began in 2013 when I joined Woodbrooke’s Equipping for Ministry (EfM) programme. It encouraged me to think about what it is to be a Quaker in the world...
Hands of Friendship
My partner and I recently had the joy of visiting dear friends in Malvern as part of a two-week holiday. We travelled, taking in Scotland, then all the way down to Pershore, Malvern and Bath. The holiday was to celebrate my wife’s sixtieth birthday, and her retirement from a...
Friends rally round for ‘Stansted Fifteen’
A Quaker activist on trial for stopping an immigration removal charter flight has thanked Chelmsford Meeting for all its support. Lyndsay Burtonshaw, an attender at Brighton Meeting, is one of the ‘Stansted Fifteen’ protestors on trial for terror offences after the group locked themselves together around the Boeing 767, chartered by...
Living the change
Britain Yearly Meeting and the Friends World Committee for Consultation brought together faith leaders and representatives from the Buddhist, Brahma Kumaris, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Quaker communities on Monday 8 October for an interfaith celebration of sustainable living to coincide with the major report on climate change released by the...
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Meeting for Sufferings: ‘A simple church supported by a simple charity’
‘We have a huge agenda today,’ Anne Ullathorne, clerk of Meeting for Sufferings (MfS), observed on Saturday 6 October in Friends House, London. The Young People’s Participation Day ran parallel to the gathering, which included updates and ministry on investment, diversity, sustainability and vibrancy.
Meeting for Sufferings: Sufferings to include four places for Young Adult Friends
Friends enthusiastically welcomed a proposal to create four places reserved for Young Adult Friends (YAFs), aged under thirty-five, at Meeting for Sufferings for the remainder of the current triennium.
Meeting for Sufferings: Exploring diversity and inclusion in Meetings
‘All divisions among people are made by people.’ This comment from an Area Meeting was highlighted by Edwina Peart, inclusion and diversity coordinator for Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), when she spoke to her report at Meeting for Sufferings.
Meeting for Sufferings: Young Friends ask ‘connecting questions’
The Young People’s Participation Day was held in parallel with Meeting for Sufferings on Saturday 6 October. Young Friends, aged between fourteen and eighteen, joined Sufferings for opening and closing worship.
MPs advised on ‘positive’ military values
The government is advising MPs to say they associate the military with ‘positive values’ such as ‘loyalty, resilience, courage and teamwork’, according to Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), which says the advice came on a ‘leaked memo’.
Sheila Hancock speaks out against indefinite detention
Quaker actor Sheila Hancock delivered an impassioned indictment of the use of indefinite immigration detention in the UK when she joined Jeremy Irons, Zoe Wanamaker, Christopher Eccleston and Maxine Peake in a new video initiative to support the end of the practice.
Thank you from Rwanda Yearly Meeting
Rwanda Yearly Meeting has thanked Friends throughout the world for supporting its appeal for funding to help install thirty-five lightning rods required by a government decree.
Jordans Quakers highlight prison issues and restorative justice
JordanS Quaker Centre held a workshop on Prisons and Justice last month, with contributions from past prisoners and a prison governor.
Quaker art in exhibition with Design Museum protesters
The Quaker artist Jill Gibbon was among the artists included in an exhibition made up of work withdrawn from the Design Museum’s ‘Hope to Nope’ exhibition.
‘Votes for women’ costume performance
Pakefield Friends in Suffolk performed a play-reading of a historic public meeting discussing the subject of ‘Votes for Women’.
A study of tribunals
Britain was the first country to include the right to claim conscientious objection as a reason for exemption from military service. The Military Service Act of 1916 brought in conscription for the first time in Britain, to make up for the heavy losses of military lives in the first eighteen months...
Eye - 12 October 2018
Silences What happens during ‘silent’ worship? Jane Short shared a flavour of her experiences with Eye after being inspired by her time in Meetings at Canterbury to pen six haikus: Silence streams and flows Settles, drifts, and soft enfolds Covers and completes. Slowly it arrives A cool grey mist of...
Letters - 12 October 2018
Atonement I fasted on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). This year my thoughts are with Muhammad Abu Khamash, a policeman living in Deir al-Balah in Gaza, who today, and every day for the rest of his life, will wake up again to the incomprehensible fact that his pregnant wife...