Culture Articles
Summer thoughts
As I lay here dozing on the lawn, I can hear the sound of children, Their joyful shrieks of delight at scoring a goal, And the glee in their laughter as they begin to win the game. The sound of the trees gently swaying in the breeze, The sound of...
Sam Peel
It is exciting to come across a new book that tells a remarkable story of a Quaker life. Sam Peel: A man who did different is a biography written by his granddaughter, Susan Wild, and was recently published by the Wells Local History Group. Sam was born in Stapleford, Hertfordshire,...
Beyond forgiving
South Africans Ginn Fourie and Letlapa Mphahlele form an unlikely team: a white Christian woman and a black atheist man. One has suffered directly from the actions of the other, but both have been victims – and risen beyond their pain. What brings them together is a profound story of tragedy...
Journey into life
Of all Christian traditions, Quakers are most committed to a mystical understanding of religion. They share this understanding with the Carthusians and Cistercians, and with the mystics of the Church. This explains why George Fox felt such affinity with the sixteenth-century Lutheran mystic Jakob Boehme. It is also why our...
Lover of souls
The love I bear to the souls of all men makes me willing to undergo whatever can be inflicted on me – Elizabeth Hooton Elizabeth Hooton’s words came to life for me on 21 June in Rugby Meeting House. Lynn Morris’s one woman show, Lover of Souls, opened with...
Endings and beginnings
While visiting Cape Town recently, I was shaken by an inequality that made it hard to relax. Townships with savage poverty exist as ghettos a few miles away from the most expensive real estate in Africa. In the modest flat where we stayed there were three lines of security. A...
In the Large Meeting House
It’s time… Friends scurry and bustle into the Meeting room where they slowly settle shifting like dogs on blankets ...
A climate for concern
In March a book that I have been working on for nearly six years was finally published. Beacons: Stories for our not so distant future is a collection of original short stories by some of Britain’s finest writers. They were tasked with finding new narratives to encompass the enormity...
One unholy journey
‘I guess’, wrote Jill Green in the beautifully illustrated leaflet, which was part of her show of twelve years’ work during Oxford Arts Week in May, ‘I guess I am asking to join the ranks of war artists’. She calls the show One Unholy Journey. This refers to her own...
The Last Runaway
This quietly remarkable novel teaches us a good deal about mid-nineteenth century American Quakers. In doing so, it has confirmed and enlightened for me what it means to be a Quaker in early twenty-first century Britain.