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.
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One of the things that kept me going through lockdown was a book depicting 3,000 years of Chinese painting. Each day I took one or two as a basis for meditation. On Facebook groups which carry these works, I am often overwhelmed by the simple beauty of, and veneration towards, the landscapes painted. There is a whole history of form and symbolism unlike that of western art.
More than 1,700 Friends had registered to attend Yearly Meeting (YM) 2024, said clerk Adwoa Burnley in its Opening Session (up from around 1,500 in 2022). Online attendance is now well established, and just short of 700 Friends intended to join that way. Everyone present should feel a full part of the Meeting, said Adwoa, but she repeated what she said last year: this was going to take discipline, compassion and patience.
In the description for Ben Jarman’s 2024 Swarthmore lecture, announced last September, Friends were told he would ‘reflect on where current prison conditions belong in the longer flow of Quaker witness on penal reform’.
A few years ago I read Leo Tolstoy’s last great novel, Resurrection, and was intrigued to learn of his reason for writing it, more than twenty years after he wrote Anna Karenina. The translator of my Penguin edition, Rosemary Edmonds, relates in her introduction how Tolstoy had been shocked by the persecution of the Doukhobors, a Russian Christian peasant sect which preached chastity, teetotalism, vegetarianism, sharing of all possessions, and above all, resistance to the use of force against evil. Their name, originally given them by the Orthodox Church, which intended it to be derogatory, has the meaning of ‘spirit-fighters’, but the Doukhobors embraced the name as meaning fighters for the spirit of God, not against it. The parallels with Quaker history were not lost on me.
A bookshop in Wales started by a young Friend has won TikTok’s ‘Indie Bookshop of the Year’ award. This was the second award nomination for Bookshop by the Sea in Aberystwyth this year.
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