Culture Articles
The Christmas Truce
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) recently offered a play for family audiences (children of 10+) at Stratford-on-Avon based on the 1914 Christmas Truce. Sadly, the run has ended, and there is no plan to bring it to London. For my husband and me it raised the question of how to introduce preadolescent...
On using this laptop for the first time
I am doing this for practice, nothing more. We practice all the time, preparing for The Real Thing.
Thought for the Week: Holding in the Light
What can it mean to hold you in the Light? It cannot change God’s Will, or Fate, or Chance, The chain, the world-without-end linear dance Of causes and effects, turn wrong to right.
Child of our time
It is hard to explain anti-Semitism. The Christian church once held the Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, despite the fact that his execution was carried out by Roman authority. Antipathy toward the Jewish race has persisted throughout European history, denying citizenship and restricting Jews to ghettos where they...
See you soon Caroline!
During the first two years of the second world war America was a neutral country and American Quakers, unlike British ones, were able to conduct relief work in mainland Europe. A glimpse into the records has enabled Bernard Wilson, a Canterbury Friend, to write a young person’s novel about...
Happier people healthier planet
Happier people healthier planet by Teresa Belton is a fascinating book that took me a lot longer to read than I expected. It is, a bit like Quaker faith & practice, a book that few would, I feel, want to read from cover to cover in a sitting. I think...
The Turning Circle
Janni first saw Alice when she was eight, but only briefly: ‘even as she looked, the girl began to look transparent, like a projected picture and then she faded away entirely’. Janni is a child of our time but Alice, who becomes her only real friend, lived in the same...
Open for transformation
This year’s Swarthmore Lecture, Open for transformation: Being Quaker, considers the symptoms of illness in a patient and offers some remedies in a clear and confident voice. It is a voice that, for some, contains traces of a dreaded word: preaching. Others discern leadership and a prophetic vision. The...
Art gallery
The Night Before Christmas
(or ‘A Visit from St Paul’) (Not to be confused with ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ attributed to Clement Clarke Moore) ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through Friends House Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; Thanks to new insulation I heard not a thing Till...