Culture Articles
Practical Mystics: Quaker faith in action by Jennifer Kavanagh
‘Oh, Jonathan – the Quakers? Lovely people, but completely impractical!’ This was the polite (but stinging) verdict, sometime in the early 1990s, on my latest head-in-the-clouds, ‘Manchester Guardian’ venture – attending Quaker Meeting in Wandsworth. It was delivered by Mrs O, the elderly mother of an old school friend, who had introduced...
Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo, by Philippe Lançon
This riveting book, which I discovered by accident in a secondhand bookshop, transcended the rest of my lockdown book pile. Philippe Lançon is the journalist who ‘played dead’ when terrorists burst into the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. This account is a story of...
Wild Olympians
And still they come – in impossible inflatables – The pregnant, the children, men, stubbled And hollow-eyed with desperation. Dwarfed by towering tankers, their tiny boats Pitched and tilted, precipitously, by ferries’ careless wakes.
Passion and Partings: The dying sayings of early Quakers, by Jane Mace
This is an extraordinary little book that defies classification. Piety Promoted was a collection of volumes from the seventeenth century, full of ‘the dying sayings of many of the people called Quakers’. Jane Mace has with great care put together a sample of these words to enable us to look...
Credo? Religion and Psychoanalysis, by Patrick Casement
What is the relationship between our emotions and our spiritual life? In this short book, an eminent psychoanalyst describes the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion in his life.
The Good State: On the Principles of Democracy by A C Grayling
Quaker decision making does not work in the same way as democracy, exactly. Friends get the ‘sense of the meeting’ and, if we do not agree, we wait until we do. Politics isn’t like that. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the least bad way of conducting politics...
Psalm 119
O Lord, thou hast dealt graciously with thy servant Butterflies are happy for our garden. Something coppery there, a Small Heath, and a Wood White skipping, luciform.
Poem: Friend
I never knew you were a Quaker. I might have guessed. A silence in the midst of argument; A pause for thought. A sense that something else was going on Quietly, all the time.
Talking About Skin: A memoir, by Rosa L Carter
Rosa Carter, who is a Staffordshire Quaker, has written a fascinating memoir. Although originally only intended for her three sons, it has now been published for a wider audience. It should be essential reading for white Quakers who wonder about the lack of black people within the Religious Society of...
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F Saad
For many Friends, the violent death in Minneapolis of George Floyd has felt impossible to discount or ignore. But like others I have been uncertain about what would be an appropriate response. ‘Black Lives Matter’ has not leapt to the top of our Society’s national agenda, though we have...