Issue 28-07-2023
Featured story
Bread and the bone: Anthony Gimpel’s Thought for the week
Back in April at Loughborough Meeting, we held a Passover Seder and shared lunch. The Passover meal is based on the story told in Exodus, of how the Hebrews escaped slavery. It’s hard to tell whether there is any factual basis for this tale, but its re-enactment in the...
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On doctor’s orders: Barrie Mahoney celebrates a family role in the creation of the NHS
This month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the National Health Service, set up by the Labour government in 1948. This has brought back many poignant memories for me, since both my parents were involved in the establishment of a hospital in rural Lincolnshire.
Hot property: Roger Babington Hill has a Finnish midsummer
Finland is one-and-a-half times larger than the UK. Forests cover most of this land, and every tree felled must be replaced. There are nearly 200,000 lakes; most cover only a few acres, but 300-or-so are like small inland seas. There is a universal right to roam, except over tilled farmland and...
Hitting the books: Sergei Nikitin tells a hidden history
In 2015, the Kremlin introduced a law on ‘undesirable foreign organisations’. This followed the ‘foreign agents’ law of a couple of years earlier. The foreign agents law was aimed at Russian non-governmental organisations (NGOs), whereas the law on undesirable foreign organisations affected foreign NGOs: they could be shut down without trial,...
A matter of life and death: Mike Wash has a personal take on assisted dying
Although there is currently no unity among British Quakers on the subject of assisted dying, I sense a move in our Meetings towards favouring legislation that results in a safe, humane and kind way of helping people choose to die on their own terms.
Bamford Quaker Community to close
The longstanding Bamford Quaker Community in the Peak District has announced it is to close, after thirty-five years.
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Quaker launches new climate movement
Rupert Read, the Quaker who delivered this year’s Salter Lecture, has co-launched a new climate movement. The Climate Majority Project (CMP) is aimed at harnessing the growing majority of people in the UK who are in favour of more action to tackle the climate crisis. The initiative is aimed...
BYM condemns Illegal Migration Act
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) has joined 289 organisations to uphold and stand alongside those affected by the government’s ‘senselessly cruel’ Illegal Migration Act. The bill passed the Lords last week, after what BYM described as ‘choppy progress through parliament, with the Lords making repeated amendments’.
Quaker play misses out on arts funding
The playwright and actor Michael Mears has had an application for Arts Council funding turned down. He was hoping for support for a twenty-eight-day tour of his play The Mistake. The work focuses on Hiroshima and the first atomic bombings, and will be shown at Quaker venues, among other places,...
Peace lessons highlight nuclear risks
Friends have helped highlight the legacy of early atomic scientists in peace lessons for secondary schools.
The Christian Quaker: George Keith and the Keithian Controversy, by Madeleine Ward
George Keith was an important early Quaker, but, as Madeleine Ward reminds us in this book, this fascinating Scot is little-known among modern Friends. Little-known and even worse understood: Ward implies that scholars have tended to get him wrong.
Eye - 28 July 2023
Quakers and beer A Friend recently discovered an unexpected connection between Quakers and a certain fermented beverage. They write: ‘Victorian Quakers were not always teetotal, as we can see in an article spotted in the summer 2020 issue of Beer, the journal of the Campaign for Real Ale.’ [In an article...
Fish tank
In an instant, every inch of existence lapsed. Small and infinite, my eyes gasped, sightless, nerves snipped, no sound passed through me. As if some greater one had tapped the glass, my being blinked. My self, more than my element, lacked notion, was a stillness beyond any sense of motion ...
Letters - 28 July 2023
Energy and inspiration Hope is a slippery thing. Paul Hodgkin (30 June) points out that telling ourselves we must have hope leads to sad indifference or unhelpful desperation. Instead we can perhaps accept a degree of sadness (about the state of the earth, for example), and centre down to benefit from...