Reviews Articles
A Christmas Day
To have had one is barrier-leaping, to have had two is beginning to be a custom, but to have had three major musical premieres performed in London’s Royal Festival Hall is surely a rarity to be recognised. Such are the unique gifts of Quaker composer Tony Biggin. Following performances...
Through a glass darkly
In 2015 Derek Guiton published a book entitled A Man that Looks on Glass. It highlighted what he felt was ‘a crisis in British Quakerism’ – a ‘growing secularisation’ within the Religious Society of Friends. There were two movements and they represented competing and ‘incompatible belief systems’. A group of nonthesists were...
Viking economics
The phrase ‘there is no alternative’ came into circulation in the early 1980s. It was used by Margaret Thatcher to justify the economic reforms of her government and enabled acceptance of a ‘new normal’: an economy of cruelty rather than compassion, an economics that ignores the problems and threats of...
Quakernomics
Economics is a ‘closed book’ to me and, at first, I feared that the same might be true of Mike King’s book Quakernomics: An ethical capitalism. But I obtained a copy, enjoyed it, and Sutton Friends later spent a profitable evening studying it. Quakernomics is a catchy and intriguing...
Bad Quaker
‘I’m not proud; I’m a bad Quaker. But I don’t deny it,’ says J Brent Bill. At first I thought: ‘I can relate to this. I’m a bad Quaker.’ From time to time some aggrieved Friend tells me I’m un-Quakerly. So, I guess I must...
Poems for peace
There’s something about poetry which reaches directly into the heart in a way which no other medium can. Poems For Peace is a collection which spans a diverse range of poets, each with a completely different style.
The truth about Trident
In December 2006 Tony Blair’s government published The Future of the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Deterrent. It was clear to a bitterly disappointed anti-nuclear movement that a decision to replace Trident had already been taken. The only question was: when? The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government was coy on the timing;...
A sharing economy
It is now generally agreed, with a few exceptions, that the model of the economy to which we have subscribed in the last twenty years, the market capitalist model, can only deliver in fits and starts and that its benefits, which are principally material, are only available to a diminishing...
What Jesus really said
In his new book The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence, Symon Hill admits that he and, indeed, all of us are biased! His perspective is that of an associate of the socialist Christian thinktank Ekklesia, a broadcaster, journalist (formerly with the Friend), Christian activist...
Waging peace
Born in 1940, one year after myself, the Quaker, activist and writer David Hartsough has participated in the most significant protests for peace, justice and equality of my lifetime: protests against military armaments destined to kill millions of civilians, against racial bigotry tearing our society apart, and against dangerous nuclear power...