Culture Articles
Birds
And the springtime, after the long winter. The birds are giving off information, each tweeting like a whistle on a stick. We have them in the gardens inside us.
It Keeps Me Seeking: The invitation from science, philosophy and religion
Andrew Briggs is a physicist, currently working in nanomaterials at the University of Oxford. Andrew Steane is also a physics professor at Oxford. Hans Halvorson is a professor at Princeton. The latter’s doctoral thesis was about the foundations of quantum physics, and he spent a year in the Experimental...
Springsteen on Broadway
‘What canst thou say… what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?’ If George Fox put this question to Bruce Springsteen, he would say ‘I took my fun very seriously, it is my service, it is my long and noisy prayer’. In this stage show he tells this story, interspersed...
Caroline, or Change
The first thing to reach you is Sharon D Clarke’s voice. In a slow moving first number her rich, emotion-laced singing keeps you watching. She plays Caroline, a domestic worker in 1963 Louisiana, the year John F Kennedy is shot. Working in a hot, stuffy basement for a liberal white...
‘The Sacred Art of Joking’, by James Cary
At the Greenbelt Festival last year, I wrote and performed ‘Spot the Quaker’. Billed as ‘a cross between stand-up comedy and a history lecture’, I was commissioned to make people laugh while informing them about who Quakers really are. The thinking was that a Quaker doing stand-up is a good...
‘My ministry is the jokes and kittens’
Did you grow up Quaker? No no, not at all. I started going to Meeting probably about ten years ago. I’d just walked the Way of St James and I was looking for a spiritual community that did an equivalent thing – sharing a journey with people without having to...
Quibbles
You believe in the love of God. I believe in love as best I can. We both believe in love. Let’s not get heated.
Ni Sisi
A man tears around the rickety stage in agony screaming: ‘Knifed! I’ve been knifed!’ Three brightly dressed, buxom ladies go to inspect his injuries. By now, he is prone on the floor and they turn him over and pronounce their verdict: ‘A bee sting!’
Testimonies and jigsaws
In his engaging new book, Quaker Roots and Branches, John Lampen continues his valuable dual mission to get his fellow Quakers to take their history seriously and to remind non-Quakers that we are still going strong today.
Waiting on the Light
All photographers who use natural light, as I do, have to wait upon this source, and also upon particular qualities of light to determine the outcome of the picture. Light is the primary agency, forming colours and tones, composition and shadows, and also mood. The pictures record how the light...