Culture Articles
A Friendly Word, by Stephen Sayers
This book is relatively short, only about twenty pages, but it covers a huge amount of ground – Quaker ground. It aims to explain what it means to be a Quaker to young people over the age of about seven years.
You Matter: The human solution, by Delia Smith
Yes, this book is by that Delia – the one who taught us to cook, the part owner of Norwich City Football Club. The years have passed and she has turned from food and football to philosophy. Much influenced by the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the (almost heretical) French...
Today I am giving up judgement
It drops but not like a knife skittering across the kitchen floor… The faces across from me: wind- bitten, old and close as mountain streams bloom in the rose steam of Hibiscus tea. I wonder how I hadn’t noticed their beauty in just this way before. Even the dog...
Battles of Conscience: British pacifists and the second world war, by Tobias Kelly
Making the choice to be a pacifist can never be easy, but being a conscientious objector (CO) in time of war must be much harder. In world war two, COs were generally treated with more sympathy than they had been in world war one, but their decision was often complicated...
First Friend
Fox by name, George by birth, Earth-Quaker elevated to silent spokesman caught in the fault line of a civil war. Let us live simply, a postscript Penn of beatitudes maintaining a silence towards slavery louder than fear of a good-god inhabiting the crucible colours hung on Calvary.
Transitional, by Munroe Bergdorf
‘In one way or another, we all transition’ is the strapline under the title of this book. How true that is of us as individuals, and of us as a community.
Last Sunday
To Harvey Gillman Last Sunday I was prompted by love and truth to read out your poem ‘Gloria’ for it seemed particularly apt. Walking to our Meeting House in the keen east wind, I’d passed the bus stop, next bus fifty minutes hence.
The Thirteenth Angel, by Philip Gross
Philip Gross is not a Quaker mystic, if that’s what you’re thinking when you see the word ‘angel’ in the title of his latest book of poems. He’s not a Quaker ranter, either, I might say – not angry and satirical, which he could have been, what with...
The garden
Who they were, what they did, and which one was to blame is what the merry-go-round of sages pondered, dancing on the proverbial pin. And pondered also down the ages if the sin was ersatz or original, or even half and half, and if it started with a forked tongue
Dining With Diplomats, Praying With Gunmen by Anne Bennett
This book arose from a conference held at Woodbrooke in 2019, at which experienced conciliators and younger peace activists came together. I was guided towards it by a Friend who shares my concern at the partisan approach of many British Friends to the Israel-Palestine conflict.