Culture Articles
The Atheist’s Guide to Quaker Process: Spirit-led decisions for the secular, by Selden W Smith
Pendle Hill Quaker Center has a long tradition of publishing Quaker pamphlets that challenge, inform and inspire. This one, number 472, ticks all three boxes. Its target readership is the growing number of non-Quaker nontheists who are employed by Quaker organisations: the men and women recruited partly because there aren’t...
Children of the Stone City, by Beverley Naidoo
Two young siblings use music to resist the authorities, who mistreat and oppress them. Little sister Leila plays Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on her flute, to let her brother know his family is in the overcrowded military court. There, handcuffed and shackled, he’s being led off to solitary...
Reconsidering Reparations, by Olúfẹmi O Táíwò
Olúfémi Táíwò is an academic philosopher who works in the intersection of climate justice and colonialism. This book has helped me better understand some of the issues.
Early Christian Anchorite
To escape this world’s contagion, I will go Forth to the wilderness and build me there A shelter; or a cave find in the hills. Thus will I loose myself from Satan’s ills.
Poem: ‘What the year has left undone’, from the Twelfth month issue, 1854
It is not what my hands have done, That weighs my spirit down, That casts a shadow on the sun, And over earth a frown: It is not any heinous guilt, Or vice by men abhorred; For fair the frame that I have built, A fair...
The Doctor, by Robert Icke (Duke of York’s Theatre, London)
This brilliant play exposed some of my worst fears about the future of human beings. The story turns round a well-known, highly successful doctor trying to save the life of a fourteen-year-old, who has contracted sepsis after a failed, self-administered abortion.
Amen fingers
Today I bless the fingers of the woman who uses yellow thread to mend a hole in my red sweater. She reads the need of a minute daisy for my light-deprived brain in the dead of December.
How to be a Refugee: Life lessons by one who escaped the Holocaust, by Irene Gabriele Gill
Oxford Friend Irene Gill has written a truly remarkable book about the first eighty-nine years of her life. It begins with how she, her parents and siblings arrived in Oxford in 1939. Both parents were part Jewish, and needed to escape from Germany. Her father found employment at the university.
I shall betray tomorrow
I shall betray tomorrow, not today. Tear out my nails today, I shall not betray. You do not know where my courage ends. I do. Five of you, hard hands with rings. And on your feet you’ve boots With nails.
An atheist’s creed
Wisdom (and folly) through waiting, fearlessly passive1; naked flame’s humility; self-transformation in apostrophic mode, HaShem2; divine non-entity jealous of all humanity; powerless Nazarene’s failure breeding courage; (spontaneous-creative fullness of being3); positive incapability; abiding holiness of place; the inclusion of time in timelessness, (and at the point of death);...