Culture Articles
Love in a time of webcam and masks
Mourners have swum in underneath me, me from hundreds of miles away and no need to brave Waverley and Piccadilly for the sake of our goodbyes.
Sketches From a Quaker’s Moscow Journal, by Patricia Cockrell
n stark contrast to how it seems today, in the 1990s civil society in Russia was opening up. This meant it became possible to set up Friends House Moscow, with support from British and American Friends. It drew together those in Russia interested in Quakers, supported advice work for conscientious...
I Cry Love! Love! Love! by Randel McCraw Helms
Drawing its title from William Blake’s hymn of praise to sexual love (Visions of the Daughters of Albion), this little book inscribes the word ‘love’ in twenty-two of its thirty-three poems. They celebrate the delights of being in the body, and every kind of sexual and sensual pleasure. The...
Spiritual Science, by Steve Taylor
Many of us do not realise how much our thinking is structured by materialism. Yet we Friends centre our lives around mystical experience, for which we have no material basis or explanation. It is the beating heart of Quakerism. Steve Taylor’s challenging book about panspiritism (the idea that spirit...
To Paulette
And have you taught the Quakers how to sing? Us Quakers, who for more than twelve-score years Have stilled our voices and made deaf our ears To music, lest it hinder focussing Upon the Light within, life’s seed and spring. We were mistaken: you have stilled our fears, By...
The Quaker Arts Network greeted 2022 with a celebratory concert of songs. John Sheldon was there
We started with ‘We do not own the world’ by Jenny Vickers. This is from a collection of Jenny’s settings of the Advices & queries and was presented as an audio-visual display. There was an uplifting approach to the music with the emphasis on ‘Rejoice in the splendour of...
Of small and cumulative acts
Come gentle Shaper, caress my acts into a quieter fire. I am tired. I have forgotten the music of silent deeds. Sweep me into the threshing floor where corn and chaff are one until the gold begins to light the discerning into the willing stream.
World Politics Since 1989, by Jonathan Holslag
The quotation at the beginning of this impressive book indicates a concern for morality: ‘No society is fortunate when its walls are strong while its morals are in ruins.’ Morality forms part of the book because of its connection with economics. In the west, a huge percentage of wealth is...
Lover of Souls, by Journeyman Theatre
Don’t Journeymen Theatre come up with surprises for us all? Perhaps their best known play on a Quaker theme is Red Flag over Bermondsey, but there’s so much more in their body of work. Friends and guests flocked to Kingston Quaker Centre last month to watch a performance...
Another journey
A hellish trip, that drag through rocks as blank as faces in a coma, for two such undertravelled, simplish souls. Their pathways glinted over carcases of hills like ribs picked smooth by vultures where dogs as daft as donkeys brayed the slightest scrape.