Culture Articles
The Water Table
The Water Table by Philip Gross. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 1 85224 852 1. £8.95. Philip Gross has had a distinguished career as a writer and teacher while managing to avoid becoming a household name. He has written fiction, children’s opera, radio plays, horror and science fiction as well as poetry. The Water Table,...
Dancing with the Spirit
‘Now, let’s have a barn dance!’ Not, you might think, the most obvious opening for outreach, but this was the line which Philip Gross credits with starting him on the road to Friends. It was his first time in a Meeting house, sometime in the early 1970s, at the...
‘I believe God will save every person’
If The Church Were Christian by Philip Gulley, HarperOne, ISBN 978 006 169 8767. £14.98. Indiana Quaker pastor and author Philip Gulley has been shaking the foundations of midwestern US Quakerism for almost ten years. This book could produce another much needed shaking there. In the 1990s Philip Gulley published a popular series of...
Sacred heart
Anyone who has experienced semana santa (holy week) in Spain will appreciate the extraordinarily dramatic way in which the story of the Passion of Christ is depicted in colourful processions through the streets. Dating back to the sixteenth century, they are at there most Catholically extravagant in Andalusia – especially...
Venice: a city marked by genius
Legend has it that saint Mark was once shipwrecked upon an island in the Venetian lagoon. An angel came to him saying: ‘Peace be with thee, O Mark, my evangelist’, whereupon the angel predicted that on this very spot would arise the most beautiful city the world would see. Cynics...
A Messiah for Quakers
Deborah Warner: an interview
Social by Social
Social by Social by Andy Gibson, Nigel Courtney, Amy Sample Ward, David Wilcox and Clive Holtham. Published online at www.socialbysocial.com. ISBN 978 1 906496 41 8. Free download, or print copy at £9.99 incl. UK postage. Lots of people are nervous of computers and the big web of connections that’s out there....
Letters to my granchildren
Baking Cakes in Kigali
Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin. Atlantic Books (Grove Atlantic Ltd). ISBN 978 1 84354 7471. Paperback: £7.99 ‘Like the Ladies Detective Agency but in Rwanda’, screams the cover of this edition. And the back. The fear with this book is that it only made the shelves because the publishers have decided we...