Culture Articles
An alternative Christmas
Christmas is, when a child is born, any child, anywhere – bringing with it, if only for a single moment, that spark of heavenly glory, as a reminder and a promise, that all can be made new.
The life well spoken
When a person you know and respect writes an authentic autobiography, which touches on aspects of your own life journey, almost every page holds some fascination that brings both enjoyment and challenge. This is my experience of Brian Brown’s Born to be Free – The indivisibility of Freedom, subtitled A...
A Christmas Day
To have had one is barrier-leaping, to have had two is beginning to be a custom, but to have had three major musical premieres performed in London’s Royal Festival Hall is surely a rarity to be recognised. Such are the unique gifts of Quaker composer Tony Biggin. Following performances...
Through a glass darkly
In 2015 Derek Guiton published a book entitled A Man that Looks on Glass. It highlighted what he felt was ‘a crisis in British Quakerism’ – a ‘growing secularisation’ within the Religious Society of Friends. There were two movements and they represented competing and ‘incompatible belief systems’. A group of nonthesists were...
Enemy aliens
How often do you have the chance of ridding someone you know of a demon that has bound her family for 100 years? My Friday Meeting friend, sometime in 2015, began telling me of her German grandfather, Rudolf, who had been interned as an enemy alien in Alexandra Palace, alongside 3,000 others, from 1914...
Viking economics
The phrase ‘there is no alternative’ came into circulation in the early 1980s. It was used by Margaret Thatcher to justify the economic reforms of her government and enabled acceptance of a ‘new normal’: an economy of cruelty rather than compassion, an economics that ignores the problems and threats of...
Quakernomics
Economics is a ‘closed book’ to me and, at first, I feared that the same might be true of Mike King’s book Quakernomics: An ethical capitalism. But I obtained a copy, enjoyed it, and Sutton Friends later spent a profitable evening studying it. Quakernomics is a catchy and intriguing...
Bad Quaker
‘I’m not proud; I’m a bad Quaker. But I don’t deny it,’ says J Brent Bill. At first I thought: ‘I can relate to this. I’m a bad Quaker.’ From time to time some aggrieved Friend tells me I’m un-Quakerly. So, I guess I must...
Bombs and friendship
You were warned what would happen if you invaded Iraq but you left us facing a predictable fate with bombs. We needed friendship, not an attack.
Poems for peace
There’s something about poetry which reaches directly into the heart in a way which no other medium can. Poems For Peace is a collection which spans a diverse range of poets, each with a completely different style.