Culture Articles
Listening post
Silence is hardly pure. Life engenders Breathing aloud, spider steps, and white noise – Your nerves fretting to their own agendas – But there seems to be a spirit that employs What rises from near quiet. Just recall When Elijah, bloodied by raw righteousness, In hiding unclear how fate might befall, Heard...
What’s Eating the Universe? And other cosmic questions, by Paul Davies
When he was living in Australia, Paul Davies was interviewed by the journal Island (Winter 1992). Davies is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, broadcaster, and best-selling author. In the published conversation, he discussed the philosophical implications of current cosmology. Some of what he said would have encouraged an exponent of the...
The dance
Not like Matisse’s ‘Dance’, as Touch for now, is merely a hopeful thing, and for them, not a dancing ring of five; nor, it seems, just communal friendship, but something more: a longing to embrace, but never quite achieving that closeness.
The Unexpected Marriage of Mary Bennet by Alison Leonard
It is always fascinating to read fiction by a Quaker author. Even when there isn’t a single Quaker character in the novel, the sensibilities still shine through. Here, Alison Leonard chooses one of the more overlooked members of the Pride and Prejudice Bennet family to build her story around.
Thee Quaker, produced by Georgia Sparling and Jon Watts
I have been enjoying the new(ish) North American Quaker podcast, Thee Quaker, for some months. I found it because I was looking for another podcast about Quakers when the Friend’s own podcast went on (temporary) hiatus, and now I also support it on Patreon (an online membership platform...
Black Mahler: The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor story, by Charles Elford
I was happy at my Anglican primary school in Croydon, though it was the sixties and it was ‘a different time’. We exited assemblies to the accompaniment of regimental marches played on a gramophone, and were expected to learn our letters from a reading-scheme populated entirely by middle-class children, none...
Jerusalem Odessa
Walk upon the rubble In the Odessa Bar of Jerusalem, they were drinking shell shock from the clouds, by whatever name this place is known no one loves them as much as this; walk upon the rubble, except perhaps their own camouflage leaders. and the collateral crucifixion, Imported weapons of...
Wake brain
WAKE BRAIN, DRAW BREATH, CRY LIFE Return once more to consciousness, the roar of being, of seeing half-bright galaxies roaming overhead, of struggles in foaming floods of alien...
Israelophobia: The newest version of the oldest hatred and what to do about it, by Jake Wallis Simon
Friends may remember an article I wrote just a year ago: ‘Is the Religious Society of Friends antisemitic?’ (30 September 2022). It was based on an analysis of letters and articles in the Friend. It provoked a wide range of responses, not all critical. I haven’t been able to pursue the...
Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig
I have never owned a Barbie. I went into the cinema with roughly the views articulated by politically-savvy teenager Sasha when she first meets Barbie: ‘You’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented.’