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.
We are each unique, temporary and necessary manifestations of creation. It’s written in our brains’ DNA, the most developed example of DNA that we know of.
What makes lovely little children become violent as they grow up? I do know that Adolf Hitler, and his successor as European invader, Vladimir Putin, were treated appallingly as children – as were my parents, and their parents before them. The Old Testament seems grossly unfair when it visits on children the iniquity of their fathers, but perhaps that was not so much a divine threat as an observation of what happens if societies do not unite to intervene where necessary – for instance to curb a father, or a leader, who exploits their power over their family, or people. Could the Peace Testimony and psychotherapy work together to help us with this?
I first attended Westminster Meeting on a Tuesday lunchtime. I was startled by what I was told: ‘We have three Meetings per week. This one is half an hour, for people working in central London. Wednesday evening is three-quarters of an hour. There’s also a Sunday one for a whole hour, but you might find it easier to start with the shorter ones in case an hour’s silence is too long.’
I scoured the Friend’s reporting on Britain Yearly Meeting for a word on violence against women and girls. Not a jot. The media is full of it, however. The government has declared its intent to tackle it, and even the royal family are in on it. Quakers? Not a peep.
Quakers have welcomed the news that Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors, has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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