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 my experience, the phenomenon we call ‘the inner Light’ is one and the same as ‘the inner child’. But these two words give a widely differing understanding; is it the source of wisdom, or is it childlike (or even childish), or all these things?
In December last year, the Friends World Committee for Consultation disengaged from the social media platform X, previously known as Twitter. So did Quakers in Britain, Quakers in Ireland, Woodbrooke, and many others. We were united by concerns about the site, in particular since Elon Musk’s takeover.
It is a pleasure to welcome faithful readers – and potential new recruits – to the longer reads in the Friends Quarterly. Last year we explored the meaning of faith across different cultures, and the meaning of membership to Quakers. We also heard from Eva Koch scholars working on the practical implications of climate justice, and read first-hand accounts of Quaker witness in Israel and Palestine.
My first encounter with samphire coincided with one of my earliest encounters with Quakers. I was heading to an undergraduate field course in Norfolk, and our lecturer diverted our minibus to the Friends School at Saffron Walden to collect his son, who joined us on the bleak shingle spit for the rest of the week. This spit is integral to the story because, by shielding the tidal stretches of the River Glaven from the ravages of the North Sea, it creates the conditions for a salt marsh.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of life. This raises profound ethical, philosophical and spiritual questions. Quakers emphasise direct experience of the divine and seek ‘that of God’ in everyone, but AI poses a unique challenge: can this technology be understood or accepted as part of the sacred?
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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