Culture Articles
Extreme caring
Dear Beryl,’ wrote a friend to the author’s wife, ‘I hear that you have been struck down.’ Beryl had suffered a stroke. Stuart Donnan, in his new book Extreme Caring – You Have To Go On, tells the story of the sixteen years that followed, through Beryl’s subsequent illnesses...
The Cause
There is a cause worth fighting for, its name is Truth and Peace, Not many care to join the fight, that would see suffering cease. For this would mean compassion, from hearts grown hard and cold, Many tales abound, of course, of those who reach for gold.
Alexander von Humboldt
Friends who are concerned about environmental issues, and the impact we humans are having upon our planet, might be interested in a book by Andrea Wulf – The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science.
Aleppo
Aleppo will never mean beauty again. Never mean rivers and mosques, hanging gardens, shaded courtyards, where old men rest, where women laugh and children play under trees, where young girls sing and writers dream of yesterday and tomorrow and artists paint their dreams. Green turned to grey, gold to dust,...
Being mortal
Anyone who has a parent, or hopefully two, who are, let us say, getting on a bit, or are themselves in their later years, should find Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, written by American doctor Atul Gawande, compulsory reading.
Hoar frost
Hoar frost, petrified hedgerows, shivering, crow alert guarding country lanes, hidden from all but local view.
Christmas rhyme
Deck the universal mess in brittle tinsel! ’Tis the season for a public pantomime Two-thousand-and-sixteen reasons to be cheerful – ho! ho! Scramble into this year’s Christmas rhyme. It’s the season for unreasonable reverting, Fix the hinges, put up beds for dad and mam, Prepare to face the feast...
Hallelujah
A meditation on Christmas, set to the metre of the late Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ There is a story very old about some shepherds in the cold who say they saw an angelic host before them. The angels told them of a birth that God had come to visit Earth...
Is anybody there?
There are few writers on religion whose books are guaranteed bestsellers. The former bishop of Edinburgh and head of the Anglican church in Scotland is one of them. From Godless Morality in 1999, through a series culminating in A Little History of Religion, Richard Holloway’s deep affection for religious tradition,...
Lessons from the past
The value of the past to inform, inspire and challenge us today is given a very telling validation in John Lampen’s excellent new book, A Letter from James: Essays in Quaker history.