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.
How much is my Quaker faith formed or influenced by my philosophical understanding – my theology, if you will? I have reached a convincement that there is a unifying principle which is underlying, sustaining – and also creatively informing – the cosmos.
The doctrine of original sin is commonly held in mainstream Christianity. And I think Friends too can recognise that humans do not always exercise their free will in ways that build one another up, or honour that dignity to which we are called as ‘children of God’. I would like us to consider a new way of looking at all this, and propose an idea of what original sin might actually be: patriarchy.
There appears to be a growing interest in spirituality. This is not just among religious groups, but also among secular people, too. The rise of interest in practices like mindfulness is just one example. The 2021 census suggested that, for the first time, fewer Britons identified as religious than non-religious, but further investigation from the Christian think-tank Theos discovered that only about half of those who identify as non-religious (or ‘nones’) say they do not believe in God; a fifth say they definitely or probably believe in life after death; almost one in six (of the ‘nones’!) believe in the power of prayer.
The Friend team has been moved by our readers’ support in the wake of the news (27 September) that we are facing an uncertain future.
Some Friends are feeling heartbreak and anger over losing – or facing the possibility of losing – their Meeting house. It’s a feeling I have compassion for, but have not experienced. Not because my Meeting house is secure, but because my beloved Local Meeting has not had one for as long as I’ve been a Quaker – not for almost ninety years, although our Meeting dates back much further than that, all the way back to 1655.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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