Issue 09-11-2018
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Memories
Reading reports of anti-Semitism in the UK saddens me, but also brings back memories of my childhood when into our road of about thirty houses moved the Jacobs family – father, mother, a little boy of six and a little girl of four. We were a close-knit community. Almost every house...
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Fragments
And we are only justified in going on living if our futures manifest at every point and at all times a heroism equal to those killed in battle. The above words are based on the thoughts of Corder Catchpool in 1919 which Emily Feldberg uses in the concluding section of her...
Something there
In 2006 David Hay wrote Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit, a book describing research fromy the University of Nottingham when they interviewed hundreds of supermarket visitors to ask if they were religious. A large proportion said they were not, but acknowledged that they felt there was ‘something there’.
Let your life speak
Sara Barnard has appeared in the Friend before – at the age of eleven her poem ‘See God’ was published in the magazine. Fast forward to today and the former attender at Winchmore Hill Children’s Meeting is a successful Young Adult writer on the shortlist for the coveted YA Book...
Eight years on
It is just under eight years since I ‘came out’ with my diagnosis of dementia in an article in the Friend. Since the diagnosis so much in my life has changed. This is nothing to do with the progress of my illness but to do with being part of the â€...
Support for climate ‘civil disobedience’
Quakers are upholding Friends’ decisions to take part in a campaign of civil disobedience as part of their witness against climate change. Several Friends took part in the ‘declaration of rebellion’ rally on 31 October in Parliament Square, London, to launch the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ movement’s campaign, which aims to ‘force...
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Swarthmore lecturer 2019 announced
Woodbrooke has announced the name of the Swarthmore lecturer for 2019. Eden Grace, global ministries director for Friends United Meeting, will explore the ‘spiritual basis for climate justice’. The title of the lecture will be ‘On Earth as it is in Heaven; The Kingdom of God and the yearning of Creation’.
White poppies on display
An installation of textile white poppies created by people from all over the country has been launched in Friends House as part of the national ‘Collateral Damage’ project. The purpose is to honour victims of wars in the last century.
Children take part in ‘Remembrance for Peace’ events
Eight hundred children will be descending on Friends House in London on 9 November to take part in activities to mark the centenary of the Armistice. The day, which is part of the INSPIRE project, is one of the fifteen major ‘Remembrance for Peace’ events taking place across the UK, from...
QSA’s ‘Capital Ring’ raises £4,000
Quaker Social Action (QSA) has announced that its ‘Step By Step’ walk around London’s ‘Capital Ring’ has raised more than £4,000 so far for people struggling with poverty.
MP’s Quaker heritage
Bristol West MP Thangam Debbonaire has spoken out at a Quaker Socialist Society event about her Quaker heritage and its effect on her politics. At Bristol Central Meeting House on 20 October, she explained how her parents were Quakers by convincement, and as a child she attended Meetings in Wiltshire and...
A foreign country
‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,’ wrote LP Hartley in the The Go-Between, a novel of lost innocence, written after the second world war but set mainly in 1900. The words seem like a sort of prophecy in reverse especially in this week, a century after...
Tyger Tyger burning bright
Derek Guiton’s thought-provoking ‘Thought for the Week’ on William Blake’s poem ‘The Tyger’ (10 August), big bang theory, and beauty and transcendence reminded me of Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s 2013 James Backhouse lecture A Quaker Astronomer reflects. Derek Guiton wonders whether: ‘…through us and through the rest of the evolved...
Eye - 9 November 2018
Planting peace Poppies and butterflies have been appearing in front of Nailsworth Meeting in recent weeks. Local Friend Marilyn Miles told Eye that the children of the Meeting ‘planted’ white poppies in time for the International Day of Peace on 21 September and this week created a poster to reflect the...
Letters - 9 November 2018
Gratitude and sadness It was with gratitude for his service and editing of the Friend, but also with a great sadness to read Ian Kirk-Smith’s last editorial for the magazine (2 November). Ian’s work has been unstinting for the last eight years, at personal cost to his health while...