Culture Articles
Given
The words lined up nicely – didn’t they just. Big and small, banging their pans till their echoes rattled in my tight chest, their once-, twice-swallowed meaning doing its level best to squeeze clear of the Light, into the light of day: my throat just a handy device, a dispenser,...
Still Love Left: Faith and hope in later life, by Michael Jackson
This 100-page book is an essential for our ageing Society. It will be an invaluable asset to our elders and ‘caring and supportive Friends’ (or whatever is replacing the name of overseers), or just anyone who is approaching later life with some trepidation. It changed my view from fearing the...
Stories from Palestine: Narratives of resilience, by Marda Dunsky
I have been visiting Israel and Palestine since the early 1980s. It has been an emotional journey. There was the buoyancy I felt when the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, when there seemed to be grounds for hope. Since then it has been a challenge to express any optimism.
On Reading the Book of Ezekiel in a Quaker Meeting
Foreseen, told in the name of One not (yet) born again, jealous, importunate God landlord of His People: Israel has no need or want to wander, will have found a plot to till and tell in less than honeyed words commanded, script in stone, covenanted, their ark, their brood, all...
In Meeting
We sat together in the white-walled room where no one spoke. God didn’t happen. I shuffled, stared at the carpet, wanted a crack in the silence, words, something to change. The shopping list in my mind said soap, potatoes, jam, then went askew adding things that weren’t for...
The Struggle for a Human Future: 5G, augmented reality and the internet of things, by Jeremy Naydler
One of the many consequences of the pandemic has been that we have become increasingly dependent on technology to connect with one another. I have found my smartphone and Zoom essential. But I have also been aware that this increasing interaction with technology may also impact on our lives in...
The Spymaster of Baghdad, by Margaret Coker
The spymaster of Baghdad is Abu Ali al-Basri, who was the head of counter-terrorism for the national intelligence agency in Iraq. His unit, the Falcons, had a spectacular record of success against Islamic State during the prime ministership of Nouri al-Maliki. Over the course of sixteen months, it stopped thirty...
The minute was good enough
Yet what of that time can be explained? Are we engaged or are we looking away? Can we expunge her eyes as she looked back from the boat shipping her to Barbados without husband, friend or child? Sweet Parthenia did you have faith in us, the unborn, friends to go...
Remarks on colour
for Graham Shaw, author of ‘God in our Hands’ See! Our bio pod, the Earth, compendium of hot colour, all tricked out in oriflamme, in indigo, in ruby, its spinach-green grasses, jasper soils, its verdigris, their slow-burn insouciance, their flair.
The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker, and Death: The end of self-improvement, by Joan Tollifson
According to William Hazlitt in his 1827 essay ‘On the feeling of immortality of youth’, ‘No young man believes he shall ever die. Death, old age, are words without a meaning, a dream, a fiction, with which we have nothing to do.’