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.
At a mental health conference last month I learned how black people are about eight times more affected by mental health issues than the white population of the UK. I am a brown Indian Quaker, and suicide has affected my family, so I attended because I too am affected by a mind that is sometimes sad.
Friends highlighted the issue of restorative justice at this year’s United Nations (UN) Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.
Quakers, we hope, can speak their mind among Friends, and feel safe to do so. But this has not always been the case. The contentious matters of sex and gender, for example, have been difficult to approach for some, and so London Quakers have endeavoured to provide a space in which Friends can feel safe to talk about these issues.
Quaker campers
Friendly fellowship around the campfire: the Quaker Campers group has been meeting annually since 1979.
Can conversations help us make good decisions? I think we might be able to answer this question by looking at a few things I’ve observed in the development of our Friendly community. I’m not a sociologist; what follows are just my own amateur reflections.
Public discussion about the casualties of the violence in Gaza is widespread. A change to the way in which the UN publishes data led to accusations that fatality numbers were being manipulated; but in fact there had been no significant change, just a poorly-communicated switch in how they were presented.
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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.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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