Issue 07-03-2014
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Monkshood
As I took the small vase of flowers to Meeting last summer I noticed that three of the six spikes of monkshood flowers were upside down. Monkshood has deep blue flowers and is closely related to the equally poisonous delphinium, but it has a large petal on the upper side...
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Changing lives
Recently, LifeLines – an organisation whose members correspond with prisoners on death row in the US – has been marking its twenty-fifth anniversary. Over that time we have put over 5,000 people in this country in touch with condemned men and women. From the outset, there has been a close Quaker involvement – not...
Sustainability - What canst we do?
Minute 36, the outcome of a gathering of Friends at the campus of the University of Kent at Canterbury in 2011, set out our commitment to becoming a sustainable low-carbon society. In her inspirational Swarthmore Lecture in 2011 Pam Lunn started us on a journey. None of us know where it will...
Sing globally, act locally
For activist Friends of a certain age, the death of Pete Seeger in January at the age of ninety-four will have stirred many memories. Whether we marched to and from Aldermaston with Michael Foot and John Collins, or sat down in Trafalgar Square with Bertrand Russell, or picketed South Africa...
Nuclear weapons
Although the post-cold war global inventory of nuclear weapons has declined dramatically from its peak of 70,000 during the late 1980s, the 17,000 or so remaining are still enough to threaten all human life many times over. At least 2,000 remain on high alert – targeted on cities, people, ports, transport hubs, military sites...
‘I could do no other’
On 8 September last year I travelled from Yorkshire to London. On arrival at the Excel Centre in east London, location for the Defence and Security Equipment international exhibition (DSEi), I had decorated trees with the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) postcard: ‘Death, injury, fear and repression are being exported from...
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Quaker fined for peaceful protest
A seventy-year-old Quaker from West Yorkshire has refused to pay a fine given to her for participating in a peaceful protest at an arms fair in London in September 2013.
Moscow concern over Ukraine
Moscow Monthly Meeting have asked Quakers worldwide to pray and work with them for peace in Ukraine. Friends in Moscow recently met to discuss the situation in Ukraine, and Russian involvement, and invited Mikhail Roshchin and Johan Maurer to prepare a statement on the basis of four principles that...
Turrell success in London
Four works by the artist James Turrell are on display at a leading London gallery until early April. The four frosted-glass screens, animated by sophisticated displays of LED lights, are one of the highlights of an exhibition at the Pace Gallery in central London.
Greening of Jesus Lane Meeting House
Friends in Cambridge are celebrating the successful completion of a project that has made their Meeting house more sustainable. Sixteen solar panels were installed on the roof of the Cambridge Jesus Lane Meeting House on Thursday 27 February as the last phase of an ambitious ‘greening programme’.
Fukushima remembered at Heysham
Lancaster Friend Mo Kelly is one of the organisers of a one-hour vigil to be held at the Heysham Nuclear Power Station in Lancaster at noon on Saturday 8 March to commemorate the accident three years ago at Fukushima in Japan. The anniversary of the nuclear incident at the Fukushima Daiichi...
The Beast of Paradise
Thou, beast: my leaven, Thou, soft-footed lion, Thou, graceful green lizard, Thou, perfect fly:
Letters - 07 March 2014
Lent I admire Sally Sadler for giving up alcohol for Lent (21 February). I am cutting out car travel completely – and not lift-sharing either. See the Carbon Fast: www.thecarbonfast.org Luckily, I am retired, old enough to have a bus pass, young enough to cycle to Meeting and serious about...