The Friend

A personal odyssey: Jonathan Wooding’s debt to Yiddishkeit

An old schoolfriend, who’s often challenged my religious and political affiliations, has recently been sweet enough to ask me about Quakers. I tend, rather immodestly, to present Quakerism as ‘the end of history’, rather in the way that Francis Fukuyama (in The End of History and the Last Man) presents parliamentary democracy. It is not, he says, inevitable, or utopian, but ‘the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution’. That’s to say that it is sporadically occurring, and flawed, but, let’s face it, almost certainly the best that we can do. It is certainly better than coercion and obedience, or libertarian wilfulness and exploitation. 

Lest we forget Gethsemane: Damian Entwistle on the setting aside of self

Unusually (for Marsden Friends) there were two pieces of vocal ministry on Sunday last.

Both spoke of resurrection; the first opened a door for the second.

Failure to understand: Paul Oestreicher, eighty years after Hiroshima

Eighty years ago, I was thirteen years old, riding my bike to school in Dunedin. 

I was worried. The morning news had told me that one single bomb, an atom bomb, had destroyed the city of Hiroshima. Of course I could not understand how that was possible. Maybe our physics teacher would explain. It was the second lesson of that day. Mr Roberts tried to help us to understand nuclear fusion, or was it fission? We didn’t really understand, and I still don’t. As he was leaving the classroom, he turned and said: ‘Boys, either we now abolish war, or war will abolish us.’

This unique place: Tom Leimdorfer on Claverham

Down the narrow Meeting House Lane, about twelve miles south of Bristol, is a hidden gem of Quaker history.

Surviving tidal forces: Tony D’Souza on the culture wars

Culture wars are nothing new. Nor is their ideology. They are always a reaction to something – a backlash, an oscillation between left and right, the tidal forces of political opinion going in and out, or mass psychology balancing itself.

Poem: I am the song

I am the song that sings the bird,
the scent that starts the vole.
I am the chuckle that sings the stream,
the stillness that sounds the pool.
I am the juice that fleshes the pear,
the sweetness that also says tart.
I am the bell in the still air
that rings in the waiting heart.