Culture Articles
White poppies
White poppies, not red, Flowers without the blood.
War graves at Cabaret Rouge
Military beyond the last you wait in neat rows for the last trump. Orderly and regular headstones on parade you form a hollow square to look on the great stone altar where grateful nations tell you that your name will live for evermore.
Susanna’s sisters
One of my first experiences of Quakerism took place in a house full of triangular rooms in Clifton, the charming Georgian part of Bristol. The house was used as a university hall of residence. It had triangular rooms because it formed the elbow between two rows of townhouses that met...
A Meeting of Friends
We sit together in Silence let the quiet sink in settle into ourselves
What if?
Linda Hoy is a well-known children’s novelist – one of her books is a set text in schools – and a Friend. She is also an explorer who has presented us with a book – The Effect: Where science meets spirituality – that I can only describe as warm-hearted, imaginative, a mine of...
What’s in a word?
Teilhard de Chardin called them ‘diminishments’ – in common parlance ‘the disabilities of old age’: stark words for what is (when all’s said and done) a natural process.
Posters for peace
The Northern Friends Peace Board is dipping into a rich archival pool to mark its centenary next year. A calendar for 2013, which draws on a selection of several hundred posters from the Board’s collection, is the first in a number of centenary initiatives. Posters were one of the main...
The Fire and the Hammer
The Fire and the Hammer is an epic work – with readers, chorus, soloists, piano and percussion – that recounts the story of young George Fox and the founding of Quakerism. It was composed by Tony Biggin and has a libretto by Alec Davison.
Memorandum of a passage to England
My beloved friend Samuel having taken a cabin For himself in the ship called Mary and Elizabeth (James Sparks the master), wept when I spake to him, I feeling a prompting in my heart to travel steerage
Dying to live
Being familiar with the gospels can lead us into thinking that we know Jesus and his teaching very well. Then, when you read a book by a writer who has steeped himself in the text, and the context in which the author was writing, new perspectives dawn. John Churcher is...