Culture Articles
Understanding Nonviolence
In 2006 Erica Chenoweth, of Denver University, spent a week at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). She was sceptical about the power and potential of nonviolence. She had, like most people, internalised the idea that ultimate power flows from the barrel of a gun. Her open scepticism did not...
A Precariat Charter
Do not be content to accept things as they are, but keep an alert and questioning mind. Seek to discover the causes of social unrest, injustice and fear; try to discern the new growing-points in social and economic life. This brief extract from Quaker faith & practice (23.01) offers us a...
A convenient truth
In recent powerful statements, Quakers in Britain have committed themselves to reducing the damage we do to the planet by use of carbon fuels and to working for greater economic equality. Both of these concerns are rooted in hundreds of years of Quaker inspiration and experience. But it has not...
…In Everyone?
Much quoted among us, It’s our firm tenet: There is that of God In everyone.
A B B
Alfred Barratt Brown, my father, was born in 1887 to a family with long Quaker roots. ‘ABB’, as he was known, was immersed in the life of Friends from birth. His faith took practical expression and made him active in many causes: the No-Conscription Fellowship, the League of Nations, the Fabian...
At the Quaker Meeting
Contained by ivory walls, and an oval of wooden chairs, muted colours of the matt, flat cushions, high benches and this handsome, slatted wooden floor. On the central table, just a thick, glass, rectangular vase of startlingly white chrysanthemums. Again; in this quiet company of souls. We drift in one...
Mary’s Joy
Jeanmarie Simpson is an American Quaker actor and playwright. She is bringing her one woman show ‘Mary’s Joy’ to Europe this month and will be performing it in Britain and Europe from February until September. The play examines the life of Mary Dyer, who was the first colonial woman...
Spectacle, reality, resistance
Human beings do not naturally kill each other. In Britain, the chances of being murdered are slightly less than one in 100,000 – a product of natural revulsion against violence and of culture rather than a fear of the law. In the USA, which has substantially higher rates of homicide than the...
Winter sestina (6 December 2014)
on summer nights she cupped love in her heart tasted the honey of a gentle kiss and the heat of an exotic garden, she roamed in a rabble of wild colours, with rows of chillies red hot in the sun, back when she was young, heart hammering, fluttering like a...
Thought for the Week: Hunting the Higgs
No wonder they love a laugh, the physicists. What ever they find or don’t, it’s OK. Symmetries of the world just remnants of those which, if perfect, would only have led to no world at all – anti-matter, matter would have cancelled each other out. Maybe. Or maybe not,...