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.
Hitchhiking from Bucharest, I was dropped off outside a very old and run-down Romanian Orthodox church, in the country’s far west. Its unkempt grounds hosted a large tree which would provide shade from the midday sun, and a chance for a nap.
Last month Elizabeth Coleman asked what Friends made of Jesus’ crucifixion (‘A big ask’, 19 January). Here’s my answer.
As early hunter-gatherer societies developed, they asked fundamental questions of themselves. These were passed down as stories. In the Old Testament, for example, we have the story of Adam and Eve. Adam, representing humankind, ate from the tree of knowledge in defiance of God, and thereby assumed responsibility for maintaining the garden. God expelled Adam from the garden (paradise) until he proved he was capable of exercising that responsibility. Life was then understood to be a struggle to return to paradise (the kingdom of heaven).
There will always be Friends who think there is no point in looking backwards, and who want to deal with needs and injustices in the present day – and of course that is what we are all called to do. But how we understand ourselves and the world can be influenced by what we do not know, or have forgotten.
The title of this new book is the first line of an advertisement that was placed in the tuition column of The Manchester Guardian in August 1938, by Leo and Erna Borger. The full advertisement read: ‘I Seek a kind person who will educate my Boy, aged 11. Viennese of good family. Borger, 5/12 Hintzerstrasse. Vienna 5.’
A series of tapestries created by a Danish Friend need a new Quaker home.
John Lampen, from the Quaker Arts Network (QAN), told the Friend that: ‘Many Friends will remember a series of remarkable tapestries in the corridors at Woodbrooke, woven, and in most cases designed, by Elisabeth Holmgaard. She was a Danish Friend who came to Woodbrooke in the 1970s to “organise the catering”.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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