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.
In 1936, at the Berlin Olympics, there was an encounter between two people that so far surpassed the constraints that each operated under, that it speaks to us of something ineffable. Jesse Owens, grandson of enslaved Alabamans, who went on to win four gold medals, formed a deep and abiding friendship with Carl ‘Luz’ Long, Aryan poster boy for Hitler’s Reich.
‘To all Friends everywhere, in the Light and Love that draws us together, we send greetings.
From 21st-25th 8th Month, Oxford young adult Friends were joined by young adult Friends from London, Glasgow, Ireland, and different parts of the United States, as well as our accompanying elder from Pennsylvania, to experience Jesus teaching, helping, changing, and knitting us together in new ways.
I once attended a service at an evangelical church in London. I confess that my reason was not primarily to worship, but to find an old friend who, I was told, attended this church. The experience was illuminating, and led me to reflect upon aspects of Quaker practice.
The service was led by a dynamic minister who generated a great deal of interaction with, and between, members of the congregation. At one point we were asked to stand and embrace the person on either side of us.
Meeting up with some old non-Quaker friends, I took them to see the Quaker Tapestry. I had visited the exhibition previously both in Kendal and when it came to Blackburn Cathedral some years ago. It was certainly worth a revisit. The story of Quakerism is detailed and well told. My friends were impressed, and felt that they now had a much better understanding of Quakers.
Our Friend Philip Gross’s latest collection, his twenty-eighth book, begins and ends with meditations on, among other things, silence. Between these two sections, entitled ‘Translating Silence’, we meet the prose-poetry of Evi and The Devil.
Nearly 500 people visited the Quaker Arts Network (QAN) gazebo at the Greenbelt Festival this summer, with 200 attending Meeting for Worship.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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