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.
Eden first came to me a few decades ago, and revealed to me that there is nothing, nowhere and nobody that is not Eden. Eden is a place inside all of us. These days I can find my way back there almost at will.
Do you believe in God? It seems like a simple question but it’s multicoloured, and so there are no black and white answers.
This is my fourth visit to Chengdu, so I am beginning to know my way around. This particular trip was to Enguang Protestant Church, in time for the afternoon service.
Last year I had the pleasure of being part of a celebration in Nairobi, welcoming 500 or so Quakers into membership. Nairobi Yearly Meeting is one of more than twenty in Kenya, many of which are enjoying similar growth. In my lifetime Quakerism has doubled in size.
Figure peace
as a thing,
see it dogged and deft
as a troutlet near transparent in its newness but
immediately shivering
with fine adjustments to the rush
What is fascism exactly? It is a word bandied around to describe anything from Nazism to the trivial bossy behaviour of ticket collectors and parking attendants. Does fascism describe a bygone period of history, or do we see it emerging again today, in an age of populism?
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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