Arts Articles
Salter Lecture: Red Flag over Bermondsey
Ada Salter was a pioneer of ethical socialism and an important figure in the story of radical politics in early twentieth century Britain. While familiar to many Quakers, she is not widely recognised outside the Religious Society of Friends. Most people do not know that she was only the fifteenth...
Indra’s net
When Indra made the world, some Indian sages said, he shaped it as a net. At every intersection on the net the god fastened a pearl.
Photography and conflict
Last December an exhibition of work by the photographer Don McCullin was held at Hauser and Wirth in Bruton entitled ‘Conflict, people, landscape’. The show ran until the end of January 2016. I followed the exhibition online and was interested in the responses to it. I loved it: fifty-five powerful images...
Jesus of Nazareth
He’d worked intensively to bring people to God consciousness with variable success. He must have known where his actions would lead. Was he tired depressed even at the magnitude of the task he had embraced?
Water of Life
Laurence Lerner
In its leaning on language, poetry can only be written by someone with a feel for the power of words, yet paradoxically it’s an attempt to shake free of words and find the ‘thisness’ of experience, the underlying actuality that words are a way of capturing. How obvious it...
Conscientious Objector
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death. I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor. He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning. But...
Reading the Bible
The Book of the People – How to Read the Bible is a new book by A N Wilson, a prolific writer of histories and novels. As the title implies, his concern here is more about the readers than the writers of the diversity of books that comprise it.
Poem: The Listening Walk
Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey’s madrigal. Basil Bunting, Briggflatts We straggle across a stubble field, tuned in to the rasp of straws, squeak-clunk of a kissing-gate, our own breath as we climb to a solitary oak, its bell of shade.
A New Zealand Psalm 23
How the shepherd loves his little woolly charges! Trot, trot, trot they run on their little stubby legs towards the spring green pasture tingling in their nostrils where he has brought them.