Culture Articles
The arts, says Quaker faith & practice, can be seen as a ‘manifestation of God’.
Joseph Jones, editor, the Friend I haven’t been able to settle to online Meeting for Worship. Fortunately, as Horace B Pointing noted, ‘The revelations of God are not all of one kind. Always the search in art, as in religion, is for the rhythms of relationships, for the unity,...
On falling in the river with Margaret Fell
‘So I sat me down in my pew again, and cried bitterly’ Margaret Fell. 1694 When I sat down, the silence was already rising, a river of quick fire. Like a body, flowing, it called to me. Quaking, I fell whole, no jot, no tittle withheld but all of me – falling. ...
Duppy Conqueror, by Robert Beckford (My Theology series)
Robert Beckford is a black theologian and broadcaster. His theological project is to rethink liberation theologies for second and third generation black British people. ‘How can people racialised as black conceive God, Jesus, and the Spirit within our social and political worlds?’ he asks. Can theology – talking about God – confront...
Innocent ground
How then to be anything but hard smooth and stone faced (practised, all set?) when the sower comes; anything but too deeply trodden, churned – by the endless roil of thoughts past, future, or never – to make her welcome, to offer him a fit place?
We Are All From Somewhere Else: Migration and survival in poetry and prose, by Ruth Padel
Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet who teaches at Kings College, London. She is also a traveller who spent time when writing this book at the migrant camp on Lesbos. Here, she writes in both prose and poetry: each section begins with a prose description, which is followed by poems...
The Quiet Haven: An anthology of readings on death and heaven, compiled by Ian Bradley
I am often influenced by the cover of a book. This was so with this lovely publication: the calm stretch of water, the single rowing boat beached on the shoreline, oars at the ready. It evinces a deep calmness and conveys a feeling of continuity and peace. It seems that...
Black Jesus
After the man was lynched, the hickory licked lightning from a white sky. The fiddler came that night and cut its trunk. The devil burned his hand, the scald of wood was still alive.
A golden light
The following was submitted to Airton Meeting’s ‘Year in poems’ for 2020. All Friends, visitors and Malhamdale residents were invited to send original work to be shown on the Meeting website, one per month for the year. Sometimes a golden light falls across the door to a place made...
Between Living and Dying: Reflections from the edge of experience, by Ruth Scott
I bought this book because I wanted to compare the author’s experience of lymphoma with my own. Ruth Scott was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Non Hodgkin’s in 2017, and I was told in 2004 that I have an indolent, slow-growing one. We both had a stem cell transplant:...
Poem: A Gathered Meeting
Written in response to the Dovetailing art installation at Farfield Quaker Meeting House, July 2021. Each time, from a new page, stillness uncoils from within me, to hang, suspended, in the Meeting’s light.