The Friend

The drama of not knowing: Joseph Jones interviews the board game designer and historian David Parlett

Famously, George Orwell said that sport was ‘war minus the shooting’. Those of us with particular memories of Monopoly with the extended family at Christmas might think that board games are not far behind. So what is a Quaker doing getting mixed up with all of that? 

I think the most important thing to say about games from this point of view is that they are both cooperative and competitive. In order to play a game you have to tacitly agree to follow the rules. And what distinguishes games from just informal play, or playing around, is that games are formal. They have a structure and they have a set of rules, and the rules of a game may be likened to the script of a play – a game that’s well played between two well-matched players is like performing in the theatre; you are in effect putting the rules into play and performing them, and that’s where the cooperation comes in. 

Respect for difference: Tim Gee has a reflection for World Quaker Day

There’s a story from early first-century Palestine that I love. It’s about a man who visits two rabbis, and demands that they each recite the Torah while he stands on one leg. 

The first teacher sends the enquirer away for his impudence. The second teacher instead invites the enquirer to stand on one leg and calmly says: ‘What is hateful to you do not do to others. That is the Torah, the rest is commentary. Go study it.’ 

Worship as a unifying force: Rufus Jones, 100 years ago in the Friend (16 October 1925)

Worship, like love, unites; speculation and argumentation divide. The moment we try to formulate doctrines, or to construct a theory of Church organisation, we discover that we are handling explosive material and we are sure to arouse disagreement, if not dissension. We are moving here in the field of debate, and however plausible our position may seem to us, there are always other ways of viewing that same position of ours which we usually overlook. In all matters of life and thought the problems are intricate and complex, and no formulation of terms can exhaust the possibilities of any situation. There is something about the ‘inner life’ of a black beetle which escapes the wisest entomologist. He describes the outside appearance, the look of the beast. He reports on legs and wings and speed of motion, but when he is done with his description the beetle might say, if it could utter itself, ‘You do not know me at all as I am in myself!’ How much more does our knowledge fall short of the mark when we are dealing with the inner life of a man, and how hopeless is the task of telling all the infinite truth about Christ, about God, about the universe and about eternal destiny! No, it cannot be done. There is more to be said than any of us say. And when anyone tries to make us take his account, we want the privilege of saying it over in our own way and of supplementing his way of saying it.

A real streak of fairness: Rebecca Hardy attends a climate assembly at Friends House

‘In the last few years we’ve witnessed a dramatic shift away from the progress we need to avert climate disaster,’ the blurb for a climate assembly held at Friends House in London rather depressingly set out. Not only had the Trump administration declared war on climate progress, it said, but ‘around the world a growing number of lawsuits are being used against governments over environmental laws and other regulations, while groups such as Greenpeace are being targeted too’.

Poem: The way home

You haven’t walked

down this road before,

pilgrim.