Reviews Articles
Staying true
Lynn Waddington was a Huckleberry child. Her river was the Delaware, idling through South Jersey, shared with brother and sister and swimming muskrats. A child in a natural world, she wrote, ‘can hear the footsteps of beetles far away.’ The family home sat without neighbours for many years until the...
Presence in the midst
The picture ‘The presence in the midst’ is one that I have seen in many Meeting houses. It depicts a deeply gathered Quaker Meeting of former years, with the genders segregated, and the filmy figure of Jesus as the otherwise unseen presence.
Wisdom
Is there any real place for wisdom in our frenetic, postmodern, quasi-apocalyptic, multi-tasking, dual- income, economically challenging world? This is one of the questions Stephen S Hall asks in Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. He maintains that among ordinary people there is a hunger for any excuse to raise their...
Religion for atheists
I looked forward to this book, hoping it might speak to those looking for a faith with no taint of dogma or superstition; wisdom without doctrine, as the author calls it.
Still Small Voice
It was a powerful experience to see the world premiere of a play about Bury St Edmunds Meeting House in that very Meeting house. The Still Small Voice is that of Margaret Kemp who, in the 1950s, insisted on keeping the Meeting house open in the face of quite reasonable...
Deepening the Life of the Spirit
Few Friends will be surprised that as Meeting co-clerk I get a lot of mail. Much of this needs sifting, sorting, being presented to an appropriate Friend or quietly filing away. One packet that was not for quiet filing was Ginny Wall’s new booklet Deepening the Life of the...
Her mother’s eyes
‘Faith makes one a pioneer, a trailblazer; it turns the traffic lights from amber to green. While we rely on the power of the self we are much more likely to dither or retire. Trusting in the Power Beyond means having a sense that all will be well. Our mission...
A healing grace
When Elaine Pryce was sixteen her four-year-old brother drowned. She blamed herself for this and so did her family. Her Pendle Hill pamphlet, Grief, forgiveness and redemption as a way of transformation, gives a most moving account of her journey ‘through a labyrinth of learnings… to forgiveness and acceptance’.
If you sit very still…
If You Sit Very Still explores the hidden area of traumatic loss, brutality and the restoration of the human spirit. In 1994, twenty-one years after her unexplained disappearance, Lucy Partington’s remains were discovered in the basement of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester.
A Peace of Africa
We have been fed so many ‘disaster Africa’ images that it takes a conscious effort to look further and realize that there are many aspects of life there that are superior to those in the West – such as the way people cooperate to achieve things and families help each other...