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.
Life often seems to be about solving a series of down-to-earth problems. One day you’re working out how to pay the car tax, the next you’re planning the new school run, or fixing the dripping tap. At times, however, the horizon can shift. Contrast, for example, the experience of looking at the sky during daytime, and then later, at night.
Should Friends ever find themselves in need of a ready-made set of scriptures – reflective, shall we say, of our iconoclastic spirituality – may I suggest the unsettling writings of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)?
‘Forty young people and fifteen staff gathered at Leighton Park School [August 20–26] for a week of exploration and reflection on “Gender Equality”.
External speakers helped us through interactive sessions, workshops, and talks. In Joe Holtaway’s session we spoke about gender stereotypes and inequality in the workplace. We also had Sarah Cosgriff who talked about identity and intersectionality – the crossroads of how we identify ourselves and how this impacts our experiences. Thomas Penny spoke about having difficult conversations, being empathetic, and remembering that we might be wrong. Cassie Gates and James Brydon-Dickenson shed light on being a trans person.
‘Fifty-seven young Quakers and thirteen adult volunteers gathered at Leighton Park School [August 20–26] for connection and reflection. This year we centred around the theme of ‘Using Our Beliefs to Construct a Hopeful Future’ through speaker sessions that helped us question preconceived notions of a hopeful future and the steps Quakers can take to help achieve it.
Three of the adult volunteer team engaged us with stories about their beliefs and how these have affected their decisions. Participants joined small discussion groups to share how their beliefs and what they hope for relates to their own lives and experiences. This session established a good foundation to examine our theme more personally.
Before I got to know people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), I would have thought it obvious that ethical consumers should avoid produce that had used child labour. But at a recent meeting organised by the Conflict Minerals Campaign, George Bani and Joel Amani made me aware that the problem is too complex for such a simple solution. Many of these children have no income other than what they earn from working in mining areas; it is an essential supplement to their families’ budget.
I suspect many Quakers are fond of the music of JS Bach, including his monumental St Matthew Passion. Two choirs, two orchestras, and almost three hours in full length. Written for Easter 1727, some consider it the greatest work of church music in history.
In 1994, the British Library (BL) bought one of the very few surviving copies of William Tyndale’s 1526 English New Testament, for over a million pounds. Thanks to last year’s reissue of the facsimile edition, readers can now get an idea of the physical reality of this book – for about one fifty-thousandth of what the library paid. Seldom has the size and weight of a book been more important. Tyndale’s NT was designed to be smuggled into England, and carefully concealed. It was extremely dangerous to own any part of the scriptures translated into the vernacular.
She is five and she’s taking no hostages.
She wants to know why the sparrows die;
why her baby brother sleeps with sewage.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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