Issue 25-09-2020
Featured story
‘I feel called by a power greater than me to grow beyond my beginnings.’
I recently wrote something as part of my participation in the online six-week Woodbrooke course ‘European Quaker Voices’. I have called it ‘Personal Reflections Today in Five European Languages’. It is subject to continual change as I continue to grow and see differently. It is a simple summary in six...
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‘If I got my hair cut I would have no money at all for food – for me or Bella.’
Bella is my beautiful three-legged cat. I love her dearly but, because of my finances on Job Seekers Allowance, I may need to let her go. I nursed Bella back to health after she lost her leg and was put in a refuge. We would both be devastated if she...
‘It must be ours like the air and the sunshine.’
Britain Yearly Meeting’s Spring letter to the prime minister called for ‘a liveable income for all’ in the wake of the pandemic. This has been a Quaker concern for some time: Friends have been considering national income schemes since 1918, when a country of slums and industrial unrest was approaching...
‘I had a new sort of dream – more like a vision. It felt so real.’
At a recent Quaker event someone mentioned ‘alienated Quakers’ – people who have stopped attending Meeting because they feel unwelcome. The Friends in question had experienced what we might call ‘phenomena beyond the individual’.
Quaker building survives US fires
The grounds of a Quaker Meeting house in California sustained significant damage to water lines after firefighters battled one of the wildfires sweeping parts of the US.
Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo, by Philippe Lançon
This riveting book, which I discovered by accident in a secondhand bookshop, transcended the rest of my lockdown book pile. Philippe Lançon is the journalist who ‘played dead’ when terrorists burst into the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. This account is a story of...
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Ready for Quaker Week
Gretchen Castle, general secretary of Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) – World Office, has said that Quakers have much to celebrate despite ‘the depths of grief’, as Friends get ready for Quaker Week 2020 and World Quaker Day (WQD).
Winchmore Hill Friend asks for IT
A Quaker councillor from Winchmore Hill Meeting is working with a social enterprise to drum up old but still usable laptops to cover the digital divide exposed by Covid-19.
BYM backs coalition to halt cycle of crime
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) is supporting a coalition including police and crime commissioners that is committed to preventing young people being pulled into a cycle of crime and crisis. Led by Revolving Doors Agency, the coalition says a smarter criminal justice system would intervene earlier to prevent ‘a revolving door...
International Day of Peace is marked
Over ten Quaker groups joined around 170 organisations in signing an International Day of Peace statement calling for the international community to ‘mainstream peace in the response to Covid-19’.
Oxford Friend is Quaker chaplain
An Oxford Friend has become what is thought to be the first Quaker chaplain of a University of Oxford college.
Wild Olympians
And still they come – in impossible inflatables – The pregnant, the children, men, stubbled And hollow-eyed with desperation. Dwarfed by towering tankers, their tiny boats Pitched and tilted, precipitously, by ferries’ careless wakes.
Letters - 25 September 2020
Judy Clinton (1953-2019) We are compiling a tribute book to writer and workshop-leader Judy Clinton who helped hundreds of people, especially Quakers, through her Writing the Spirit workshops, and we are seeking tributes from anyone who knew her. Judy was a member of Gloucestershire Area Meeting and attended Cheltenham...