Issue 31-07-2020
Featured story
‘Learning happens when we wander across borders, refusing to be contained within them.’
Yesterday a tiny bird was perched on our television aerial, singing incredibly sweetly. But instead of just letting me listen, my busy mind came butting in, wanting to know its name.
Top stories
Quakers mark Hiroshima and Nagasaki Days
As millions get ready to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombs that left tens of thousands dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Quakers joined Christian CND’s call for a global ban on nuclear weapons.
‘Awareness is about what we are doing when we are not meditating.’
After many years of apprenticeship (ten years in all, not including the first three when he swept the floor, made tea and did whatever he was told) the young man had achieved the rank of Zen teacher. Now, on a rainy, windswept day, he felt happy and confident in his...
‘The smiles and quick words acknowledged that we were all involved in something very important.’
You could have been forgiven, during lockdown, for thinking we were facing a war. The language (of front lines, heroic sacrifice, ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘the invisible enemy’ and, where PPE was concerned, ‘make do and mend’) showed how official public discourse is more attuned to military strategy and rhetoric...
‘We should acknowledge that the Quakers did not exactly invent silent worship.’
The Anglican Morning Prayer includes directives such as ‘Silence is kept’, and ‘The reading(s) may be followed by a time of silence’. But the principal concern, of course, is not to keep silence: ‘O Lord, open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise.’
‘The project is a symbolic and practical expression of the Quaker peace testimony.’
In winter 1940-41 twelve-year-old Joyce Gee came face-to-face with death. She was caught in the blitz. Anti-aircraft fire and falling bombs made the world a ‘hell of noise’; explosions rocked her shelter; a nearby house vanished into rubble. Her neighbours were killed. Joyce survived, but the memories never left her.
All articles
Friends of Color’s message to Quakers
The Friends of Color group has released an epistle calling on Quakers to heed its ‘Call to Action’ on the racial pandemic. ‘To our Friends in the wider Quaker world, we the Friends of Color, can’t breathe,’ said the Outgoing Epistle of the 2020 Virtual Pre-Gathering of Friends of Color...
Brighton Friend forms music fundraiser
A Quaker composer and patron of The Leaveners has started a fundraising music group after performing on her doorstep throughout the ‘Clap for our Carers’ appeals. The money raised via a Just Giving donations page will go towards helping musicians who are struggling due to the restrictions of the Covid-19...
Future local, not global, says XR book
Extinction Rebellion (XR) needs to ‘break out of the XR bubble’ and enable entire communities ‘to demand change’, says a new XR digital handbook that Quakers have been sharing.
Covid-19 in Africa
The Quaker Africa Interest Group (QAIG) charities group has said that the situation in Africa is highly changeable as countries grapple with the differing challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. Member Lee Taylor said that a leaflet distributed with last week’s Friend indicating that schools in Zimbabwe would be opening...
Roger Fry: A biography, by Virginia Woolf
After four years studying English Literature at university, Virginia Woolf stuck in my mind as an author I really needed to look at in more detail in later life. It’s only taken me thirty-five years and a global pandemic to get round to reading her biography of Roger Fry,...
For America in a time of a drought
The rain in the old cemetery is simple. It falls on yarrow, clover, ragwort dispensing pearls into the grain of day, into the Yorick skull-clot of Devon clay. The tissue of the warm-wooded dead is wormed with the first drop of its showers, runs into the finger-hold of tiny oaks,...
Eye - 31 July 2020
A rib-tickler There was a young Quaker from Bude Whose language was exceedingly rude An elder said ‘Friend, this must come to an end’ And his reply I must now exclude… Bill Chadkirk
Letters - 31 July 2020
An ambitious project I was interested to read the review of Michael Wright’s Jesus Today in the Friend (19 June). The author is attempting an ambitious project – to describe the essence of Quakerism as he experiences it in England today and going back to George Fox; to describe the essence...