Arts Articles
Curmudgeonly sonnet at YMG
More humility, please. For we did not ‘Abolish slavery’. The record also shows How slaves at fearful cost themselves arose To fight, forgive, and change the global plot.
The other pilgrim
A Quaker was there also, as ye wistė That I had almost forgot from my listė So silent was he – when that it was Sunday, But talkėd more than any by the Monday.
Quaker silhouettes
Portraits of early Quakers are extremely rare. One of the reasons for this was strictly practical – most Friends did not come from the social class that could afford painted portraits. However, there were also serious religious objections to images of all kinds. Early Quakers shared with other nonconformist religious groups...
Whither Next?
We train them to fire bullets that we have sold them And wonder why they kill the rioting crowd.
Art in the Society
A woman turns, her arms flung high, her body twisting in the movement of the dance. She is vulnerable, naked to the light, and energized. She seems to move with the power of the moment, and yet she does not move at all. She is frozen in time, a sculpture...
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...
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...
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€...
Spirit Rising
In 2008 Quakers Uniting in Publications gathered an editorial board of ten young people from different branches of Quakerism and different countries. The board spent a year gathering contributions from around the Quaker world. Then they met in 2009 to select and edit the pieces. Now titled Spirit Rising: Young Quakers Speak,...