Issue 05-07-2019
Featured story
Thought for the week: Roger Babington Hill knows the score
Yesterday I spent over an hour erasing pencil marks on my copy of the cello part for Dmitri Shostakovich’s wonderful Fifth Symphony which we are to play next month.
Top stories
‘The sense of impotence has moved out of numbness and into constructive rage.’
Raw feelings of unresolved grief abound in the area around Grenfell – unsurprisingly, given the nature of the tragedy and all that is becoming known as the inquiry continues hearing evidence. Witnesses have courageously spoken words from inner thoughts that initially were too awful to verbalise. These include shocking descriptions of...
‘It’s easy to create a social justice message, harder to weave it into a sophisticated product.’
Two years ago, I had an idea. Sam Walton was talking about how he and Daniel Woodhouse, also known as ‘Woody’, had broken into BAE Systems’ site in Warton with the intention of disarming planes bound for Yemen. Listening to some of the details about plane spotters and sizes of...
‘I find it hard to articulate why I didn’t apply for years, or why I decided to apply when I did.’
Every Quaker has a choice to remain an attender or apply for membership of the Religious Society of Friends. I don’t intend to discuss whether or not we should be a membership organisation, nor what the process or requirements for membership should be. But whichever choice we make has...
A living will
‘Your kingdom come, your will be done.’ (Matthew 6:10) The parables in the gospels give us many metaphors for the kingdom of God; harvest, a wedding, a treasure, a party, a judgement. It is not a territory, but more connected with time, the eternal breaking into the now. Matthew’s gospel...
Quakers stand for peace on Armed Forces Day
As Quakers gathered to promote peace on Armed Forces Day, this year’s occasion got off to a shocking start with news that a nursery allowed preschool children to dress in real military body armour during an event.
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Quaker peace campaigner wins compensation
A Quaker peace campaigner who claimed she was deliberately run over by a car has been awarded £15,000 in compensation after a long-standing fight for justice.
Mass lobby urges action on climate
More than 100 Quakers from England, Scotland and Wales came to Westminster last week to take part in ‘The Time is Now’, a mass lobby of parliament urging MPs to take action on the climate crisis. Faith representatives, including a former archbishop and a young Quaker, addressed the gathering, saying that...
Global Peace Index: Quaker House launch
The average level of ‘global peacefulness’ improved for the first time in five years, according to the 2019 Global Peace Index launched at Quaker House in Brussels last month. However, according to the index, now in its thirteenth year, the world continues to be less peaceful than a decade ago.
Letter to Foreign Office about Iran
The Northern Friends Peace Board (NFPB) has called for the UK to ‘act to reduce tensions and commit to nuclear disarmanent’ in the light of escalating conflict with Iran, particularly since attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
‘Adam Smith: What he thought and why it matters’, by Jesse Norman
Jesse Norman’s new book is a bravura manifesto of how our politics and economics should be run. Many of us may have heard of The Wealth of Nations with its conceptualisation of markets and the ‘invisible hand’ that steers them. But Adam Smith also wrote its later chapters with...
Letters - 5 July 2019
In essentials unity The letters from David Taylor, Peter Bolwell and David Keating (14 June) are timely. Peter Bolwell is right to say that atheism’s denial of spirituality ‘strikes at the heart’ of Quakerism. However well-intentioned, inclusivity has its limits. Should Friends of the Earth welcome those who think that...