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.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the minister, ‘I believe you have something in your pocket’.
At Aylesbury Meeting last year, during Heritage Open Day weekend, we welcomed a hundred people every day. One of these visitors was particularly moved by being in our beautiful, listed Meeting house. He arranged to meet me to talk through a possibility that fascinated him. We went for tea in the nearby museum a week later.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) set up a youth football tournament in Gaza last month.
Recent editions of the Friend have considered the question of whether Quakers are institutionally antisemitic. This has led me to ask whether Christianity itself is fundamentally antisemitic. That is our heritage, after all, and many Friends maintain Christian leanings. But the Christian tradition may bring with it some unexamined perceptions of Judaism, learned from particular interpretations of the Bible. Some of these may lead to negative views of Jews and, in the light of the conflict in Gaza, attitudes towards Zionism.
I might be here under false pretences. I’m not a horticulturalist, nor even a trained gardener. If you have tricky questions about groundskeeping, I’m not your answer. I would prefer to think about this article as a means of opening up a conversation. By pooling our knowledge we may come up with something useful.
We are, I believe, witnessing the most fundamental transformation of Quaker worship in Britain since its origins more than 300 years ago. This process began with the introduction into worship of video conferencing systems, notably Zoom, during the recent pandemic.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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