Culture Articles
Inside the Echo Chamber
The first gift you can offer, in an artwork or a conversation, is space. In a generous space we feel received but free to have our own reactions, to stay or to go. We have a choice. Choice is at the heart of Echo Chamber: the historic choice whether to...
Feeding the darkness
The challenge offered to us was that of creating and delivering a theatre piece that would address head on the issue of state-sponsored torture in relation to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 2. Journeymen Theatre exists to explore dramatically such Quaker concerns and we regard this work as...
Disarming the argument
Tim Wallis says of his book, The Truth About Trident: Disarming the Nuclear Argument, that in one sense the book took three months to write, but in another sense it took thirty years. How so? It draws indirectly on his lifetime in peace work.
The Lollards
A memorial stands on the hill overlooking the Buckinghamshire market town of Amersham. It marks the spot where, at two separate times in the early sixteenth century, seven men and women were burnt at the stake for heresy. The seven were Lollards and part of a growing group across Europe...
Blood and earth: modern slavery
Kevin Bales is co-founder of Free the Slaves, consultant to the UN Global Program against Trafficking of Human Beings and author of a widely praised book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Don’t talk about how the big people eat at the big table These words, spoken...
What are Quakers?
At heart we Quakers are mystics, Experiencing the Light, We trust in love and peace, And choose to heal, not fight.
Salter Lecture: Red Flag over Bermondsey
Ada Salter was a pioneer of ethical socialism and an important figure in the story of radical politics in early twentieth century Britain. While familiar to many Quakers, she is not widely recognised outside the Religious Society of Friends. Most people do not know that she was only the fifteenth...
Indra’s net
When Indra made the world, some Indian sages said, he shaped it as a net. At every intersection on the net the god fastened a pearl.
Petals and bullets
The book Petals and Bullets: Dorothy Morris - New Zealand Nurse in the Spanish Civil War by Mark Derby is a well-written and absorbing story. It is based mainly on eighty personal and evocative letters written by Dorothy Morris to her family in New Zealand between 1937 and 1946. In these years...
Photography and conflict
Last December an exhibition of work by the photographer Don McCullin was held at Hauser and Wirth in Bruton entitled ‘Conflict, people, landscape’. The show ran until the end of January 2016. I followed the exhibition online and was interested in the responses to it. I loved it: fifty-five powerful images...