Culture Articles
4am
A pencil of light pokes its way between the curtains. Plays upon your eyelids. You wake. Slowly your mind unscrambles. Your body moves stiffly towards the morning. Time future, past, present assemble. A choreography of space unfolds. A woodpigeon sings on a tree, somewhere. The patterns of yesterday’s fears...
Halewid
In a well slept morning sing senses from the first flush in lush language of birdsong, the choral chorus greeting the hāliġ(1) hour. Follow the sky’s creased curves of sunrise, its night rain pools puddle down the ground.
Neoliberal Religion: Faith and power in the twenty-first century, by Mathew Guest
As a Quaker pacifist, I’ve been shocked by the militarism of some Anglican spaces and ceremonies. Here in Durham, one sometimes encounters solemn processions inside the cathedral, led not by a bishop with a crook, but by a man carrying a large sword, just like Penny Mordaunt in the...
Chapel statue
Here on a cool, curled, college wall I stand between my fellows and above the world, a still stone figure on a pedestal, with a curved, carved canopy sheltering my head. Though lifted aloft from the earth, I am ...
Cherubims: Poems, by Edward Clarke
If you’ve ever sighed with relief when the children leave Meeting and go their own fidgety, smirking way, then shame on us all. Take a look at what we’re missing. Edward Clarke is happy running the Children’s Meeting, even when the kids are having tantrums, or interrupting...
Double exposure: Jonathan Doering starts a conversation about race
Covid lockdown was a strange time for everyone, but my family and I were lucky. My wife and I had jobs that were manageable from home, our son was well-provided with schoolwork, and we were living in a beautiful part of South Yorkshire. Our living-room window looked out over the...
Bring to book: Alison Leonard takes a prompt
When the author Hilary Mantel died, her many admirers realised there would be no more magical novels, no more of her incisive commentary, or heartbreaking accounts of topics like women’s illness. Six months later, however, it was revealed that Mantel’s next work would have taken quite a departure....
Is He Out There? Debating The God Delusion, by Paul Laffan
This book is essential reading, but what an awful title! Is He Out There? We Quakers, connoisseurs of interiority (and somewhat scientifically minded too, on a good day), know the answer to that question. But this book is not an exercise in sifting false from true religion. Here, Paul Laffan...
The Good Prison Officer: Inside perspectives, edited by Andi Brierley
This book is written by past prisoners, all of whom are now professional practitioners and educators in the criminal justice field. They draw on lived experience, as well as diverse literature on penal policy, to explore examples of professional practice.
The day and the seed of small things
How will it come, the day of small things between the heart-break and herb robert; the rape and the ox-eye daisies?