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.
Glass, with its transparent quality, can serve as a metaphor for clarity and purity, and the interplay of light and glass has long captivated human imagination. In many spiritual traditions, including Quakerism, light symbolises the presence of God – the Light. Symbolically, it represents the clarity that spiritual seekers strive for in understanding the mysteries and purpose of existence.
The climate change Conference of Parties (COP28) in Dubai broke a certain silence. For the first time, nation states overcame strong resistance from wealthy fossil fuel extractors and confirmed the need for ‘transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems’.
A bunch of interesting stuff
Barbara Mayhew, of Bury St Edmunds Meeting, recently reported that her grandson William, aged ten, was heard saying this about the Quakers: ‘My Granny does a bunch of interesting stuff. She goes to the Quakers, which is quite cool – they are rather like the Boy Scouts and the Silent Library Club, except more interesting. They talk about world problems and sometimes they even solve them!’
The recently-relocated Peace Museum in Bradford is starting the new year by refitting its new building. The museum showed off its new premises recently in the iconic Salts Mill, in the World Heritage village of Saltaire, Bradford.
While visiting Quaker House in Geneva last year (see ‘United front’, 20 September, 2023), I wondered what Friends in Britain could learn from some of the dynamics between staff at the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO). I was particularly interested in the relationship between the programme assistants and the programme representatives.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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