Issue 09-10-2020
Featured story
‘We need to be with others who are inspired.’
There are many voices expressing concern about growing individualism, continuing the discussion which followed when Ben Pink Dandelion asked if everything in Britain Yearly Meeting is to be related to personal choice. In his review of James Cone’s Black Theology of Liberation (28 August) Mark Russ has pointed to the...
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Edinburgh Friends mark Quaker Week
Edinburgh Quakers created a virtual tour of its Meeting house to share for Edinburgh & East Lothian Doors Open Days 2020 and Quaker Week.
Meeting for Sufferings: Digital discernment
Friday October’s Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) was originally planned as a residential gathering at Woodbrooke. Those Meetings offer representatives a good amount of time for reflection and fellowship, so it was perhaps this reminder of life before Covid restrictions that contributed to what was, at times, a somewhat sombre...
‘There is a great need to nurture all Friends into a way of being.’
Brian Speedy was a well-respected Friend and treasurer to Friends Home Service (now Quaker Life). He liked to talk about ‘having money in the kitty’ and often had us in stitches with his delivery on the Home Service financial position. But Brian, who was a senior figure in Lloyds of...
‘In my professional life I see at first hand the damage wrought on our civil society.’
Some years ago I was asked to write a book based on my experiences as a business journalist. Root of all Evil? How to make spiritual values count argued that when business values are divorced from our spiritual values, ordinary people are exploited, vested interests are enriched, and the biggest...
‘Spirituality is a response, not a groping in the dark.’
Quakers have always been Seekers. Seeking has deep roots in the religious and political ferment described in Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. In allegorical form it appears in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Quaker searching is for something personal, and profound – indeed ‘Ways of Seeking’ has its...
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Friends berate ‘deeply authoritarian’ anticapitalist guidance
The Quaker Socialist Society (QSS) has spoken out about government guidance that schools should refrain from using teaching materials from organisations that have expressed a desire to end capitalism.
Surrey Quakers in Black History Month
Surrey Quakers feature in an archive collection exploring the local abolition movement to celebrate Black History Month. The material was compiled by the Surrey Heritage team as part of its ‘Marvel of the Month’ collection for the Surrey History Centre. The October archives explore Surrey’s contribution to the campaign...
Africa Friend says internet is key
Expanding internet connectivity in rural areas in Africa is key to bringing Friends together through the pandemic, a leading Quaker has said.
Peace pole for US Friends
A Quaker Meeting in the US has erected a peace pole in its garden.
The proud old lineage
We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why (James Elroy Flecker) When found, they are free to follow their imaginations, gladly, wherever they may lead:
Practical Mystics: Quaker faith in action by Jennifer Kavanagh
‘Oh, Jonathan – the Quakers? Lovely people, but completely impractical!’ This was the polite (but stinging) verdict, sometime in the early 1990s, on my latest head-in-the-clouds, ‘Manchester Guardian’ venture – attending Quaker Meeting in Wandsworth. It was delivered by Mrs O, the elderly mother of an old school friend, who had introduced...
Letters - 9 October 2020
Old age In her eloquent and moving article, Adrienne Frazer (25 September) wonders ‘what it is that retired people need that younger people don’t’. One has to pay people to do what one has always done oneself – for example, cleaning, painting and decorating, perhaps gardening, doing repairs that would...