Culture Articles
Exploring Isaac Penington: Seventeenth-century Quaker mystic, teacher and activist, by Ruth Tod
Isaac Penington was one of Quakerism’s earliest, most articulate spokespeople, working deeply with images of the Inner Light and the seed. The son of a prominent Puritan, Penington spent his early adulthood carousing with the smart metropolitan set. Yet these fast times and high living didn’t lead to...
Words for the end of the day
Before sleep can sweep your face with its cloak, cradle in your heart the passing day: re-run all you did, with whom you spoke: what memories to take away, what lessons learnt? Those you love, go round them, each in turn, friends too and some you know less well, share,...
Friendless Childhoods Explain War, by Bob Johnson
Our friend Bob Johnson has produced something here that delights our sensitivities, and challenges our assumptions about international affairs. We expect Bob to be making connections, and we’ve certainly got that here. Reading though this short book made me stop, and stare, and think. In the end it made...
Prayer
Love letters to what I can’t imagine, letters that shape-change into loops and twists I didn’t mean to write, finding the best words and letting them go.
The Christian Quaker: George Keith and the Keithian Controversy, by Madeleine Ward
George Keith was an important early Quaker, but, as Madeleine Ward reminds us in this book, this fascinating Scot is little-known among modern Friends. Little-known and even worse understood: Ward implies that scholars have tended to get him wrong.
Fish tank
In an instant, every inch of existence lapsed. Small and infinite, my eyes gasped, sightless, nerves snipped, no sound passed through me. As if some greater one had tapped the glass, my being blinked. My self, more than my element, lacked notion, was a stillness beyond any sense of motion ...
Our ghosts, our machines
The objective was programmed into the machine without preferences: Cross, Skull Hill. Nails. Gethsemane was a divergence under stars, a tinge of unsmelt olive. The weeping friends were surplus. The kiss, unfelt, barely fulfilled its intended direction. The cross was not particularly heavy. Sacrifice seemed an inelegant equation.
Our ghosts, our machines
The objective was programmed into the machine without preferences: Cross, Skull Hill. Nails. Gethsemane was a divergence under stars, a tinge of unsmelt olive. The weeping friends were surplus. The kiss, unfelt, barely fulfilled its intended direction. The cross was not particularly heavy. Sacrifice seemed an inelegant equation.
Earth’s Voices: Messages for our times from nature’s guardians, by Laura Newbury
As an art student, Laura Newbury tried to capture the beauty of nature around the River Nairn, in northern Scotland. Thirty years or so later she returned to the moors and began to converse with the ‘nature guardian’ of the area. She calls this guardian a deva: Immortelle, an angel...
Brought to book: Kate Macdonald on Elfrida Vipont and The Lark on the Wing
In the 1970s, when I was reading my way through Aberdeen Children’s Library, I discovered an old novel from the late 1940s. It was about a girl who decides she wants to be a singer, and all the characters wete Quakers. I had never heard of Quakers, but I...