Culture Articles
The Puritan and the Quaker
The success of London Transport’s design policy was rooted in the successful professional relationship between Holden and Frank Pick, the managing director of the Underground companies, subsequently London Transport.
The Word
The most famous recent example of a ‘miracle’ play was Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle; it was so distasteful that the BBC kept it under wraps for twenty years. A young girl, comatose as a result of a road accident, was apparently cured by an act of rape performed...
What is Evil?
My wife and I once ran a course at Woodbrooke on responding to evil, in which painful experiences were lovingly shared. But three participants were dissatisfied. They wanted metaphysics: is evil real, or is it only a shadow, the absence of good? What is its power? Can it control us...
The ministry of play
Think of this as a note of introduction, tucked in the flyleaf of a book. The book is Off Road To Everywhere, a collection of poetry for children, which ideally I would leave lying round your Meeting house, for the young people in your Children’s Meeting and for anyone...
Living Adventurously
‘Before we love others we need to love ourselves. How do we treasure our own Light and gifts. How do we learn to share what we have to offer? Do you seek to find the place where your own talents and the world’s needs meet?’ This is number...
Uneven geographies, Nottingham Contemporary, 8 May to 4 July 2010.
At Yearly Meeting both Roy Hattersley and Paul Lacey inspired me as I listened to their lectures about aspects of our unequal world. The following day I went to see Uneven Geographies, an exhibition in which artists from five continents explore experimental ways of depicting globalisation and its human consequences....
The Pump
What is the background to the poem? The poem was triggered by a photo I took of the pump in the yard at Bridport Meeting House. However, the poem isn’t particularly about Bridport: it’s some imagined location with a pump like that. There have been other pumps Iâ€...
In comes the citizen approach
Beyond the Profits System: Possibilities for a Post-Capitalist Era by Harry Shutt. Zed Books. ISBN 978-184813-417-1. £12.99. How are we to get through the current global financial and economic crisis? Harry Shutt, who saw the storm clouds approaching several years ago, offers some radical solutions to the problems...
It’s the economy, clever
The end of money and the future of civilization by Thomas H Greco Jr. Floris Books. ISBN 978-086315-733-2. £12.99. Prosperity without growth by Tim Jackson. Earthscan. ISBN 978-1-84407-894-3. £12.99. Back in the 1970s, an academic called Theodore Roszak roused some of us with fighting talk...
Honouring death through dance
Soul Play is a gentle and intimate dance-theatre duet that explores the moments following a young man’s death. Kate Flatt devised it in response to her own grief upon the death of family members. A secondment at a local hospice as part of a Rayne Choreographic fellowship encouraged this...