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 the canonical Gospels we only read about Jesus’ life from the age of twelve, when he is visiting the temple. But we can learn more about his childhood from texts known as the Infancy Gospels. The Infancy Gospel of St Thomas, for example, thought to be written in the second century CE, tells the story of Jesus aged five, playing with his friends by a stream and fashioning birds out of clay. But it was the Sabbath, when such activity was forbidden: ‘So Joseph went there, and as soon as he spotted him he shouted, “Why are you doing what’s not permitted on the Sabbath?” But Jesus simply clapped his hands and shouted to the sparrows, “Be off, fly away, and remember me, you who are now alive!” And the sparrows took off and flew away noisily.’
Isaac Pennington said that ‘All our words, all our conversation, yea every thought in us, is to become new.’ What does this mean? My understanding is that it asks us to explore inside ourselves, to examine our minds, our assumptions, our belief systems, and our paradigms of how life works. This tallies with my experiences as a Buddhist Quaker, where I am also asked to look deeply within.
Around 150 singers gathered at the House of Commons’ ten-metre-high lobby last week to witness against Rosebank, the North Sea oil field.
Back in 2016, The Guardian commissioned a short thought piece from the rapper Akala. He talked eloquently about how ‘The propaganda of “British values” is a distortion of history’. I showed the piece to my coaching group – I was teaching Philosophy A Level, and ‘British Values’ had been recently introduced to the curriculum.
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