Issue 04-06-2021
Featured story
Thought for the week: Neil Morgan is long sighted
Life, they say, is like a tin of sardines: we are all of us searching for the key. This key may be out of reach, to be discovered, or it may be a key that we once had but have somehow lost.
Top stories
A class act: Karen Dickson attends QCEA’s peace education conference
A couple of weeks ago I was home alone on an overcast afternoon in England. But when I logged online I was with over 500 people, from sixty-three different countries and five continents. I forgot the gloom outside: the Peace Education Conference had begun!
Canadian Friends Service Committee: Anniversary reflections by Keira Mann
2021 marks ninety years since Canadian Friends Service Committee (CFSC) was founded. In preparation for our ninetieth anniversary, I have spent much of the last six months searching out and speaking with some of the Friends that have made CFSC’s work possible. Hearing these stories of triumph, persistence, and heartbreak...
Priority delivery: Robert Almond, Jeff Beatty and Caroline Nursey discuss change at BYM
At Yearly Meeting 2019, Friends welcomed the priorities developed by Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) trustees over the previous year: thriving Quaker communities, a sustainable and peaceful world, and simple structures and practices – all distinctively Quaker, integrated, and well governed.
Vigil for George Floyd
A Bristol Quaker organised a vigil to mark the anniversary of the death of George Floyd last week. Friends were among those who gathered for the Lantern Vigil of Remembrance at College Green in Bristol on 25 May to hear speakers and poets, with time for reflection and sharing. One of...
Sorry About the Mess, by Heather Trickey
I’ve been wondering whether this book should carry a warning, like those you get before a movie begins: ‘Swearing, violent emotions’; ‘Readers may find some poems distressing’; ‘May cause choking from laughter’.
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Friends hear from Gaza
Quakers came together online last week to hear the voices of people affected by the bombing in Gaza and the West Bank. The webinar called ‘Hearing from Gaza and the West Bank’, hosted on 27 May by the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) team, included Azzam from Gaza,...
Honour for enslaved woman at Quaker house
A historic house in the US is to honour an enslaved woman who saved the Quaker-built home from a fire set by the British during the American revolution. The woman, known as Dinah, was ‘inherited’ by Quaker William Logan from his wife Hannah Emlen and lived at Friend David Hickokâ€...
Quaker universalists ponder ‘life, time and eternity’
‘Life, time and eternity’ was the theme for this year’s Quaker Universalist Group’s conference, with speakers including an anthropologist, a Christian retired vicar, a Muslim shaykh, a Zen Buddhist, a leading physicist and a lecturer in Hinduism.
EU climate policy ‘not coherent’, says QCEA
A new report by Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA) has said the European Union climate policy is ‘not always coherent’ with the bloc’s stance on peace and human rights. The new report on climate, peace and human rights also says that the ‘EU’s increasingly militarised approaches to...
Florence Meeting finds new home
The group of Friends who formed a Florence Meeting two years ago have relocated to an English cemetery with Quaker connections. Kirsten Hills, who grew up as an attender in Canterbury Meeting, brought together a group of Friends after ‘craving’ the ‘silence, peace and headspace’.
Be Patterns: An illustrated Advices and queries, by Jenny Vickers and Brett Fletcher
‘Sing and rejoice, ye Children of the Day and of the Light; for the Lord is at work in this thick night of Darkness’ wrote George Fox in one of his epistles (Quaker faith & practice 20.23). The musician Jenny Vickers, in collaboration with the artist Brett Fletcher, was inspired by...
After: A doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond, by Bruce Greyson
It was just a wasp sting, but the evening before an early morning flight was not the best time to discover I was allergic. When the ambulance crew arrived they could not immediately find my pulse. Fortunately, after a couple of adrenaline injections and two hours in A&E,...
Elijah’s Crossing
i.m. Graham Shaw, (1944-2021), author, teacher, priest, friend There, at the footbridge, in Lublin province, Kacyzne’s* camera finds Elijah out, his cap, his waistcoat, the shod foot lifted back, crossing the river, a grey flame. And working horses (the charcoal, the chestnut), break for the silver waters running ...
Letters - 4 June 2021
Refugees at home Hearing the world news you can feel ashamed to be human: we could do, and could be, so much better with our free will, our highly developed brains, and the ability to laugh and love. We can rise to George Fox’s challenge to walk cheerfully over...