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.
The old man was dying and everybody knew it. He had been dying for some time. The food poisoning was slowly taking its toll on his frail eighty-year-old body. He lay exhausted beneath two trees as the sun beat down.
How did you feel when you were asked to do the Swarthmore Lecture 2025, organised and funded by Woodbrooke? Were you surprised? Were you at all daunted by the task, or did you feel excited and energised by the invitation?
I was definitely excited. Maybe a little surprised. The work itself was energising, but I was aware of a lot else happening in the world and other work that I couldn’t neglect, so I spent some time with my support committee working through whether it was the right time. Looking back, my impression is yes, it definitely was. The research I spent so much time doing expanded upon other ministry work rather than taking anything away from it.
In the wake of the raid on Westminster Meeting House, Friends from Central England Quakers met with Haroon Chughtai, a superintendent at the West Midlands Police, and Khadija Sulaiman, their head of chaplaincy. The meeting was suggested and arranged by Kamran Shezad, the director of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences. Kamran is a well-known local activist, who has been advising West Midlands police on behalf of Muslims to good effect for some time. He knows Quakers well and wanted them to have an equally-good working relationship with the police.
One of the many joys of General Meeting for Scotland (GMS) is that it rotates among the four Area Meetings (AMs). This time we met in Aberdeen, the granite glistening in the infrequent sunshine.
I have been studying Quaker history for almost forty-five years, and it has been very unusual to come across a book devoted to a Friend of whom I had never heard. But this was the case with this biography of Elizabeth Heyrick (née Coltman 1769-1831).
How to reconcile science and faith? The question is not a new one, and for one twelfth-century philosopher it was central, as he treasured both his faith and his scientific knowledge very dearly.
I shall no longer run from sorrow
nor seek to avoid him
by going down another street of thoughts.
I shall not try to overcome him with my strength.
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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.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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