Culture Articles
Silent night
Silent night, children take flight Run for their lives on a starlit night Leave the home they were born and bred Uncharted highways of hope lie ahead To escape from the bombs and the gunfire Fleeing the fear and the dread.
Interview: John Creed
The artistic metalworker and sculptor John Creed has enjoyed a varied career in industry, education and the creative arts spanning more than five decades. An instinctive artist, his work seems to emerge from the hinterland between conceptual and practical, aesthetic and utilitarian, making his work particularly striking and tangible. Much...
Images of Christ: The Presence in the Midst
Almost all the art works in this series have been either in churches or in public galleries. Last month’s was the nearest I could come to an image of Christ in an outside space. But I also wanted to point you towards one in a domestic space. And thatâ€...
Interview: Dictynna Hood
I first met filmmaker Dictynna Hood when she was an overseer, I an attender, in North London. She subsequently moved on from Quakerism. However, although not a practising Quaker, she still feels some common ground with Quaker values. Perhaps this common ground is one route of entry into her distinctive...
The last of me
One rickety chair, two plants long-dead on the mantelpiece, solitaire laid out three-quarters played, a crisp packet, some crumbs on a plate, an eye of mould in a pot of tea, the tab-end of my last cigarette.
Faith in politics? A testimony to equality
Catherine West is a Labour MP and a former leader of Islington council in London. With Islington councillor Andy Hull, she has written Faith in politics? A testimony to equality ‘a call to action, to encourage us as Quakers to own the challenge of inequality, offering civic leadership in all...
Stone soup
Some of my favourite people are hysterical Jews. I suspect that Jesus Christ was one. So, here’s the story of stone soup, told to me by a hysterical Jew who is a friend of mine. There was a war on. The invading army was beleagured and almost defeated. Their...
The silent cry
The mystic, I believe, is not a special kind of person; but every person is a special kind of mystic. Some people often suspect that mysticism is for weirdoes. On the whole the conventional churches of every faith do not like it, for it takes its authority not from church...
Chrysalis
The background for the early memories of Jane Simmons, the teen heroine of Chrysalis, Sue Parritt’s latest book, is the ‘swinging sixties’. Sue, who became a member of Bournemouth Meeting in Hampshire in 1967 at the age of sixteen and has worshipped with Australian Friends since 1970, has a strong Quaker...
A meditation
When you are speaking, I am: Reading between your lines; Listening beneath your words; Interpreting...