Reviews Articles
Being Christian
Rowan Williams, in his book Being Christian, has some thought processes and ways of articulating his religion that are alien to someone with my scientific background. I found it, however, a fascinating and sometimes amusing work that contains a clever juggling with ideas. In my teens I was a born-again...
Love matters
Now that he has retired from life as a professional economist, David Cadman wants to talk to us about the power of Love. In his book, Love Matters, he tells us ‘in Earth days I am old. And I love according to my age – foolishly, deeply and without condition’. All...
A Sustainable Life
A year or so ago I was chatting with a Friend about our Quaker engagement with sustainability. He said: ‘it’s part of our DNA now.’ And it is. It has long been the focus of conversations in Local Meetings about what it means to ‘let your life speak’. It...
Fields of Blood
There is much in Karen Armstrong’s new book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence that is of importance to Quakers. The author says that she embarked upon writing it in order to counteract the common misconception that wars and large-scale violence are caused by religion. In...
Understanding Nonviolence
In 2006 Erica Chenoweth, of Denver University, spent a week at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). She was sceptical about the power and potential of nonviolence. She had, like most people, internalised the idea that ultimate power flows from the barrel of a gun. Her open scepticism did not...
A Precariat Charter
Do not be content to accept things as they are, but keep an alert and questioning mind. Seek to discover the causes of social unrest, injustice and fear; try to discern the new growing-points in social and economic life. This brief extract from Quaker faith & practice (23.01) offers us a...
A convenient truth
In recent powerful statements, Quakers in Britain have committed themselves to reducing the damage we do to the planet by use of carbon fuels and to working for greater economic equality. Both of these concerns are rooted in hundreds of years of Quaker inspiration and experience. But it has not...
Spectacle, reality, resistance
Human beings do not naturally kill each other. In Britain, the chances of being murdered are slightly less than one in 100,000 – a product of natural revulsion against violence and of culture rather than a fear of the law. In the USA, which has substantially higher rates of homicide than the...
The Christmas Truce
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) recently offered a play for family audiences (children of 10+) at Stratford-on-Avon based on the 1914 Christmas Truce. Sadly, the run has ended, and there is no plan to bring it to London. For my husband and me it raised the question of how to introduce preadolescent...
Child of our time
It is hard to explain anti-Semitism. The Christian church once held the Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, despite the fact that his execution was carried out by Roman authority. Antipathy toward the Jewish race has persisted throughout European history, denying citizenship and restricting Jews to ghettos where they...