Issue 09-08-2019
Featured story
Thought for the week: ‘Part of what it is to be human is to find solutions by making mistakes.’
I’m not likely to hold many fifty-pound notes – these days I make more payments via computers than with cash. So it was with an ironic pleasure that I heard that the new polymer notes will feature the face of the ‘father of computing’ Alan Turing. ‘Turing was an outstanding...
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Losing our religion?
‘How nontheists view discernment is giving me a headache.’ I have just finished reading Rhiannon Grant’s Telling the Truth About God (see review, 8 March). This humane, kind, thoughtful book makes use of ‘ordinary theology’ and the bottom-up (rather than top-down) ideas of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein to think about...
‘I am concerned that modern Quakers have lost some of this inner direction.’
A young attender once told me what he thought of Quakers. He said that most people thought Quakers were ‘nice people’. I was very disappointed at this, and I then tried to explain to him that trying to be nice was a complete waste of time. I had tried it...
‘Visual art can literally change how we see things.’
In the early 1980s I attended a meeting where the artist and co-founder of the German Green Party, Joseph Beuys, was speaking. He was mesmerising. In his trademark hat and coat he strode to and fro, describing with his arms as much as his words a world where money flowed...
The salt of the earth
The salt of the Earth drift lightly through our days carrying nothing extra. A bus ticket beyond expectation, back to the streets of childhood where they grew kindly spindly as rue, or meadowsweet.
Absolutist COs recognised
Four hundred conscientious objectors (COs) barracked in Richmond Castle in north Yorkshire during the first world war will be recognised for the first time in a heritage project announced last month.
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Quaker MP slams Boris Johnson at Theresa May’s final PMQs
Quaker MP Ruth Cadbury launched a blistering attack on Boris Johnson, the incoming prime minister, at Theresa May’s final prime minister’s questions (PMQs). The Labour MP for Brentford and Isleworth asked the then prime minister how she felt about handing over to ‘a man who, among many things,...
BYM joins call for more sanctuary for refugees
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) joined over 120 signatories to send an open letter to the new prime minister urging him to make a lasting commitment to welcome refugees.
Stockport Quakers support Pride
Stockport Quakers joined the town’s Pride parade last month for the first time.
Quakers mark Hiroshima Day
Paul Parker, recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), spoke at Coventry Hiroshima Day last week to remember the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Film of ‘Boston Four’ Mary Dyer
The seventeenth century Quaker Mary Dyer is the subject of a new film based on a one-woman play that is being performed at Spring Friends Meeting House in the United States.
Letters - 9 August 2019
Vibrancy and vivacity As clerk to the Vibrancy in Meetings Steering Group, I am pleased to see the articles about the success of the work, and the plans to expand the programme so there is a local development worker within reach of all Quaker Meetings in the next five years. ...