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.
The longer I live, the less I know, and the more capable I am of seeing whatever I hadn’t noticed before. Knowledge can be a barrier to learning, and I sometimes feel that I have to let go of what I know in order to see more. ‘Seeing’ gives way to ‘vision’. Life becomes most fulfilling as an adventure of life-long learning. My attitude becomes, ‘I don’t know, others might, I need to listen’. That takes humility, openness, curiosity, imagination and intuition. Such practice leads me to choice, which some call free will, our highest human capacity, not yet found elsewhere in creation. Challenges and failures become stepping stones to seeing from broader perspectives.
This year’s preparation sessions for Yearly Meeting (YM) are happening a couple of weeks before YM itself, preceeded by the usual round of special interest group Meetings. Friends have to choose between a range of overlapping sessions, but at the Friend we’ve tried to get to as many as possible. Sessions are continuing as we go to press, so we’ll have more next week – as many of the words as we can, but (as Eric Morecambe might have had it), not necessarily in the right order.
On 29 January, the government published a policy paper, ‘AI Opportunities Action Plan: One year on’, which features some bold – and entirely positive – claims about the benefits that AI will bring. The government claims that, in that one year, it has ‘moved decisively from ambition to delivery’ by starting ‘the biggest skills drive in a generation… upskilling 10 million workers by 2030’ and ‘supercharging the economy’. In the state sector, it is ‘embedding AI into frontline services… creating thousands of jobs… [and expanding] public sector compute [sic] 20x’ by 2030.
In 2025, the Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) decided to carry out a survey among Local Meetings in Britain to get a clearer picture of what Meetings and individual Friends are doing in this area. We wanted to do this so we could give better mutual support and so we could raise a stronger voice with policymakers at this critical time.
The evening of 26 September 1983 was unusually cold. Stanislav Petrov pulled on his greatcoat and left for the Serpukhov-15 base. He was duty officer on an early-warning system designed to detect nuclear missiles.
The house was spartan, with no flowers
To welcome guests tired from day-long
Journeys, yet the brown-beige furnishings
In ev’ry room gave a certain kind
Of carceral aesthetic for the
Forty days of silence, like a month
In a monastery in Tibet,
Or in a wilderness with only
The sky, the wind, the day and the night
And the cold, bleak barren landscape and
No one but myself with whom to talk.
Become a subscriber to enjoy unlimited access to our articles, dating back to 2009! Online subscribers get the Friend to their inbox each week, can comment on articles, and dive into our 1914-18 digital archive too!
Whether you are new to Quakerism or have been going to Meeting for years, you’ll find something here to inspire, inform and challenge you.
News | Views | Reviews
Written by and for Friends on the bench
Subscribe