Issue 10-04-2020
Featured story
‘This favourite of Quaker slogans never was intended to encourage us to take part in extreme sports’
One might easily conclude that just now is not the time for living adventurously. Indeed, most – if not all – of the external activities that we might class as ‘adventures’ are more or less closed to us during the current lockdown. But sitting in my chair at home this morning, sharing...
Top stories
‘The boundaries between hygiene and superstition often blur.’
We have, over the past month, become a nation of frantic hand washers. Rightly so, from a purely scientific perspective. Handwashing does not eliminate the risk of infection but it does reduce risks of transmission, thereby slowing the spread of disease. Looking at the COVID-19 pandemic from a western Christian...
‘I began trying to join up human prehistory and contemporary migration…’
When my children were small I worked as a part-time Iron Age reenactor. The ultimate embarrassing parent. This was the beginning of an interest in ‘prehistory’. But I don’t like that term. It seems to imply that, before we recorded things in writing, history was somehow not as interesting....
‘Drinking has retreated behind front doors where it can do more harm.’
Stay at home. Three short words, used by Boris Johnson during his broadcast on 23 March, changed all of our lives. Working from home, teaching children, even online Meetings for Worship – we have transformed our lives almost overnight.
Still
This earth is the same earth, is it not, which we traversed with determination, where, in former times, we ventured forth, when travel was permitted, and choice was ours over time and destination? This earth now proclaims a different dominion. It cries out now from the fissures we have torn...
Yearly Meeting Gathering postponed
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) has postponed the 2020 Yearly Meeting Gathering, saying that the COVID-19 pandemic ‘very sadly makes it impossible to bring 2,000 people together for this event’.
All articles
‘Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus.’ (John, 11:5)
On the surface John chapter 11 is the story of a miracle – or, as John calls it, a ‘sign’, one which we, with our twenty-first-century minds, might have difficulty in believing. But we should not let that prevent us from trying to understand John’s theology.
‘It is a terrible cure, but cure it can be for our greed.’
Amazing. The government has suddenly recognised that money is a fiction, which we can imagine and repurpose as appropriate, and that it is now appropriate to support the NHS, nationalised services, and the community at large! We are getting closer to a Citizen’s Income. All we need next is...
‘Senior managers will think very differently about environmental damage.’
If you kill lots of people you might be charged with genocide and taken to the International Criminal Court (ICC). But if you cause serious harm to Earth, often there is no penalty whatsoever. This is why Bristol Area Meeting has sent a minute to Meeting for Sufferings, to request...
‘Spend on community, not military’
A Quaker public health researcher has led calls for the prime minister to reallocate defence budgets towards the NHS, social care and community support for people affected by coronavirus and isolation. Quaker Ceri Dare said, on behalf of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), that the money diverted from military budgets...
Campaign to release detainees
London Quakers and the Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) have been urging Friends to petition the government about the plight of detainees during the COVID-19 crisis.
CND: ‘Save Labour peace minister’
Quakers are supporting Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s call for members to lobby the Labour Party to retain the position of peace minister.
Quaker remembered for Women’s Day
Last month, more than thirty people gathered to hear a talk about a US Quaker lecturer and writer who documented her struggle as a black woman in seventeenth-century Philadelphia.
QSA advice on funerals
Quaker Social Action (QSA) has put together an online guide to help people planning funerals at this time. The advice on ‘organising a meaningful funeral’ on its website includes ideas to help mark cremations or burials when people are unable to attend.
A snippet from ‘Current news among Friends’
‘The autumn term at Leighton Park School will be memorable for the startlingly sudden onslaught of the influenza fiend. On to a very full school, very keenly at work and play, it swooped, and in three or four days over 70 of the 90 boys were in its clutches. Nearly half the...
Letters - 10 April 2020
Worshipping from home It was interesting to hear all that Friends House, Woodbrooke and other Meetings around the country have been doing to run online worship time (27 March). I must also thank you for including Jamie Wrench’s article, in the same edition, about worshipping together from home without the...