Culture Articles
The Handmaid’s Tale
The series The Handmaid’s Tale, broadcast on Channel 4, has been one of the television drama successes of 2017. Now it has been shown, we can reflect on the series as a whole. It is ‘based on’ Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and is not a simple adaptation....
Interview: Philip Gross
My wife and I decide to make my visit to Penarth to interview Philip Gross part of our holiday. We drive over the day before my appointment and that evening we visit the beach and watch our son Noah. It seems an apt image of playful innocence engaging with and...
Interview: Tracy Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier has woven together life and writing through a dazzling string of novels, from the acclaimed Girl with a Pearl Earring to the Quaker-inspired The Last Runaway, which tells the story of an English Quaker, Honor Bright, who is gradually drawn into the Underground Railroad in the American state...
Quaker peace-building in art
The seeds of the 2018 Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) calendar were sown a long time ago. For years I had heard about Quaker peace-building work, but I was very vague about quite what was involved. Reading about Adam Curle’s practical and academic work (he was the founding professor...
Homeless
I looked into his eyes and saw only emptiness infinite resignation: despair. I saw someone drowning in the ocean of hurting, rootless, flotsam, adrift homeless: without home. No belonging, no company someone beaten to nothingness. Empty eyes, empty heart.
Images of Christ: Of shrouds, handkerchiefs and emeralds…
In her 2017 Reith Lectures historical novelist Hilary Mantel coined a memorable definition. ‘History,’ she said, ‘is what is left in the sieve after the centuries have poured through it.’ I thought of this as I mused on this month’s artwork, which is definitely the oddest of the twelve.
Marcus Borg and God
Borg, Marcus Borg. I met him about six years ago. He was introduced to me by a Friend from another Meeting when we were on a course at Woodbrooke – and it was love at first sight! Well, not quite ‘sight’ as he wasn’t there in person. The Friend recommended...
The Judas Passion
The Passion story is told for the first time from the perspective of Judas Iscariot in a new work for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment: The Judas Passion. Sally Beamish, who is a member of Glasgow Meeting, has composed the music and she explains that her Quaker background...
A long way down
The title poem of Averil Stedeford’s The Long Way Down: Poems of Grief and Hope sets the tone for this recently published collection of poetry. It is simple, explicit and accessible, yet contains personal and poignant truths.
The debate
Like those quotidian voices, And the child in the warm kitchen Clinging close to her father’s knee; Against that well-armed hot debate, In the shell blasts of emotion, By a chamber carried about On the batons of fear and hate, My small poems were swept away – They said, with...