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.
They say that Britain is broken – that nothing works and everything is in decline. According to the narrative of these doom-mongers, our democracy is barely functional, the NHS is about to implode, and the BBC is run by subversives. But the people who say this kind of thing do it out of self-interest. They want to foster discontent because, by spreading a negative vision of a broken Britain, they are able to offer their alternative.
Sheffield & Balby Area Meeting’s Racial Justice Group has been exploring how Sheffield and its Quakers profited from the Atlantic economy, and the mass enslavement of Africans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Our discoveries form a Sheffield piece of the jigsaw puzzle that comprises Britain Yearly Meeting’s (BYM’s) work on reparations.
At the end of 2024, two of us from the Welsh Centre for International Affairs (WCIA) set off on a five-day educational visit to Croatia. It was a joint project with the Centre for Peace Studies (CPS) in Zagreb. As a Quaker, and as the peace education manager at the WCIA, I was intrigued by CPS – by what it is doing to develop peace education and activism in Croatia, and by what we could learn from it.
The Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill, going to its second reading today (24 January), poses a challenge for some Quaker MPs. While I am delighted to see that some MPs with Quaker links – Steffan Aquarone and Carla Denyer – have committed to vote for the bill, others do not yet appear on the list of supporters.
The Lakenheath Alliance for Peace (LAP) is a coalition of nearly fifty British and international peace groups. These have come together to protest existing militaristic installations, and the threatened stationing of nuclear weapons, at RAF Lakenheath airbase. The LAP invites you to take part in an international peace camp from 14–26 April.
What might one make of a text thousands of years old, pulled together by writers in a culture very different from our own, to create a mixture of fable and purported historical narrative? The accounts feature people who can experience a relationship with God, but do not always behave well. Have we anything to learn from their stories?
Please God they are not at my door.
It’s likely God is looking the other way for they are here
walking up the hill approaching our bungalow. A mass
of desperate human debris. Some must be carried,
some have sticks, others lean on friends.
Become a subscriber to enjoy unlimited access to our articles, dating back to 2009! Online subscribers get the Friend to their inbox each week, can comment on articles, and dive into our 1914-18 digital archive too!
Whether you are new to Quakerism or have been going to Meeting for years, you’ll find something here to inspire, inform and challenge you.
News | Views | Reviews
Written by and for Friends on the bench
Subscribe