Culture Articles
Art as ministry
Complete silence. A gathered Meeting. Rich, unspoken, ministry; expressed through pencil, charcoal and ink. Such was the experience of Friends who gathered for an art-based Meeting for Worship, led by Judith Bromley Nicholls and Linda Murgatroyd, at the close of a recent Quaker Arts Network (QAN) event. Each was given...
War Requiem
I sometimes feel I have never got over the first world war. This is an odd thing to say, since I wasn’t born till long after, and my father only enlisted in 1918. But it still haunts me, and now that Quakers are thinking of marking (but certainly not celebrating)...
Rachel Wilson
It all started in Friends House Library a few years ago when my wife Molly was searching out material for her book on Daniel Baker. He was a seventeenth century naval captain who, according to state papers, became ‘tainted with Quakerism’ and was removed from service. He embarked, instead, on...
The path
Resetting my fickle, twitchy compass, Refinding God’s true North, I get my bearings and Tramp off.
Refraction: Moving images on Palestine
The uneven relationship between Israel and Palestine is the theme for a powerful exhibition at a superb new gallery space, the P21 Gallery, just off London’s Euston Road, near Friends House. Refraction: Moving images on Palestine is art that attempts to come to terms with what is, for some,...
In the labyrinth
In the labyrinth There are no wrong turns And no dead ends. Each step brings you on Inevitably, inexorably, Towards your destination
Cause for concern
It may seem strange to review a slim paperback by a Quaker published forty-two years ago, but Herbert Dobbing, for nine years head of Brummana High School, was a far-sighted and reflective commentator, not only as a skilled summariser of the broader history of Palestine, but for his insights into...
On surviving the operation
Because I did not die, Two strangers Continue to live in a world of darkness. Another two to suffer the half-life offered by dialysis. All made poorer by my survival.
‘Resettlement’ in the East
On 27 January 1945 advancing Russian troops liberated the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland. 27 January has become Holocaust Memorial Day when we remember ‘the final solution to the Jewish question’. At the time it was cynically promoted as ‘resettlement’ in the East.
The hour-glass
I am but an hour-glass. These tiny glinting grains Comprise my store of seconds, My sum of joys and pains.