The Friend is a weekly magazine in which Friends speak to each other and to the wider world, offering their insight, ideas, news, nurture and inspiration.
Nurturing Quaker community, each issue offers a space for Friends to share their concerns, and to support each other in faith and witness.
The Friend: enriching, inspiring and connecting the Quaker community since 1843.
There is that of God in every one. Therefore, there is that of God in Donald J Trump, apparently. But what does it mean for us to answer that of God in a man who seems to have no moral or ethical sense?
Two of the pivotal experiences of my life were: one, going to Israel and the occupied territories with Woodbrooke, almost thirty years ago; and two, a walk to Santiago de Compostela with a group from Southwark Cathedral, a decade or so ago.
John Lewis (1940-2020) led a remarkable life. Born to a family of sharecroppers in rural Alabama, the third of ten children, he grew up in extreme poverty. By the time he was six, he said he had seen only two white people in his life.
William Rotch was a Quaker from the island of Nantucket who got caught up in the US revolutionary wars, and then the French Revolution. Nantucket Quakers were whalers, and sold their shipping fleet’s whale oil to the British, which was the only market rich enough to pay for it. The Friends then bought supplies from the Americans with their profits. But Rotch’s pacifism made him a target to both sides in wartime, and eventually the Nantucket Quakers, faced with starvation through their loss of access to all their markets, emigrated to different colonies in the eastern seaboard of North America, and to Britain and France. By basing himself in France but refusing to side with the aristocrats or the revolutionaries, Rotch once again placed himself and his family in danger. He was threatened with violence, and had to escape once more. Back in the US he was once again accused of treachery to his native land – by John Adams no less – and wrote a memoir telling his story, defending his decisions, which he said held true to his Quaker faith.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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