Issue 23-06-2023
Featured story
Top seed: Gill Sewell’s Thought for the week
It was warm on Sunday. As I sat on my balcony, I remembered it was my turn to lead the ecumenical prayer group the following morning. I was slightly stuck for ideas so I searched the internet: ‘What does the Bible have to say about hot weather?’. A list of...
Top stories
A Quanglican journey: Paul Oestreicher on the religious background to a life of pacifist campaigning
I arrived in New Zealand in May 1939, the only child of a German-Jewish refugee family. From September of that year, we were enemy aliens. New Zealand and Germany were at war. It took some courage to befriend Germans, even those like us who had fled from Hitler. The churches in...
Counter intelligence: Ruth Jones on AI
My first formal job, pre-internet, was at the Centre for Our Common Future, set up to network global environment and development NGOs. I left because I couldn’t see any truth or integrity in the ‘sustainable’ development trope, which just looked like a flaccid greenwash for ‘don’t make anyone...
Take a seat: Robert Ashton overthinks a paradox
I have an innate ability to overthink. Last Sunday’s Meeting for Worship was a classic example. Like many Meeting houses, ours has benches round the outside of the room, with a few chairs in a circle in the centre. I invariably sit on one of the benches, partly from...
Cover story: Simon Webb learns how to share with children
When you meet people on Zoom, you can usually see their rooms behind their faces. Until recently, I had a secret contest going on in my head concerning which background I liked best: the bulging bookshelves, the walls full of pictures, or the richly-patterned curtains. I say ‘until recently’ because...
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New Yearly Meeting formed in Europe
The Central European Gathering (CEG) made history last month when it became a Yearly Meeting (YM). The decision was made at the twenty-sixth CEG in May in Gdansk, Poland.
Quakers ask peers to block legislation
Britain Yearly Meeting joined forty-eight organisations in calling on peers to reject ‘extreme and chilling’ government measures.
Quaker Truth and Integrity Award
The inaugural Quaker Truth and Integrity Award has been given to investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. The writer, who also won the Orwell Prize for political journalism, and was a finalist for a 2019 Pulitzer Prize, made headlines when she exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal in The Observer.
Calls to stop military recruitment of children
Quakers have welcomed calls from United Nations (UN) child rights experts for the UK to stop recruiting children into the armed forces.
Friends gear up for extra YM session
Almost 500 Quakers from across Britain are already booked to attend the extra Yearly Meeting (YM) session on 1 July, online and in person, at Friends House.
Letters - 23 June 2023
Language and diversity I find letters about language, theology and diversity both fascinating and irritating. Fascinating because they show we really are seekers, irritating because an assumption is sometimes made that we are simply exchanging intellectual divisions. At an interest group at one Yearly Meeting, I was told never...
Cherubims: Poems, by Edward Clarke
If you’ve ever sighed with relief when the children leave Meeting and go their own fidgety, smirking way, then shame on us all. Take a look at what we’re missing. Edward Clarke is happy running the Children’s Meeting, even when the kids are having tantrums, or interrupting...
Chapel statue
Here on a cool, curled, college wall I stand between my fellows and above the world, a still stone figure on a pedestal, with a curved, carved canopy sheltering my head. Though lifted aloft from the earth, I am ...
Eye - 23 June 2023
Collective nouns ‘Of course, few Local Meetings achieve it; nor even Area Meetings. But could one say that at Yearly Meeting there was a “Diversity of Quakers”?’ Jane Taylor An active silence of Quakers. Or, if you prefer: A silent activism of Quakers. Gordon Smith