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.
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I was born and brought up two miles from Greenham Common, and my first memory is of watching planes towing gliders. I now know these were probably carrying soldiers to land behind enemy lines on D-Day. It was from here that Dwight Eisenhower made his famous ‘The eyes of the world are upon you’ speech.
As a Christian-shaped Quaker, I sometimes perform a procedure learned from my Catholic mother. I take a valued book, open it at random, and put a pin in a passage. Anglicans who use the New Testament in this way refer to it as ‘divina lectio’, one of the rules of Benedict of Nursia. Using this method with my Greek Bible recently, I fingered Luke 21:20, where Jesus predicts the ‘end times’. I once believed that biblical prophesy of this kind was in conflict with Quakerism, and felt secretive – guilty even – about holding these apparently irreconcilable sets of beliefs. But more recently I read that early Friends had no such conflict, and even that George Fox made the book of Revelations central to his understanding – it was the only book that he ever wrote a commentary on.
Quakers are to appear on BBC Songs of Praise next week, on the theme of equality.
In 1655, a man called Francis Dickinson took part in Britain’s conquest of Jamaica. He was awarded a land grant for his contribution. He became a Quaker soon after, and thus the Dickinson family in turn became one of several Bristol Quaker families who owned plantations and used an enslaved African workforce. Francis’s eighteenth-century heirs inherited four profitable plantations. Two of his descendants still identified themselves as Quakers even when claiming and receiving government compensation for the abolition of British slavery in the 1830s.
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