Issue 04-01-2013
Featured story
Thought for the Week: 170 years of the Friend
One hundred and seventy years ago, in 1843, a group of Quakers launched an independent magazine. The Friend has been on an interesting voyage since then. It is ironic to note, for me as an Ulsterman, that the decision to start a new publication was prompted by ‘the circulation that...
Top stories
Congo re-visited
Four years after my first visit to Friends in eastern Congo, I returned to see what difference, if any, three years of formal partnership between Quakers here and in the Democratic Republic of Congo had made to the lives of those in one of the poorest and most war ravaged...
A white elephant
Nuclear weapons are the most expensive white elephant of them all. Ever since Ernest Bevin, as Labour foreign secretary, told a cabinet committee in 1946 ‘we have got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We have got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it’, the...
Nominating the Nobel
In the autumn of 2012 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union. At the time I found this news of particular interest because I am presently completing my first year as the British representative on the American Friends Service Committee’s Nobel Peace Prize Nominating Committee. Each year,...
A tax on love
I wonder whether anybody remembers that early Quakers rejected marriage because it was a sacrament; that is, they regarded it as one of the extortion rackets run by the established church. A fee had to be paid to the priest for perfectly ordinary everyday events, such as birth and death....
Back to the land
Someone from the Chinese Falun Gong movement recently passed me a free copy of a Chinese paper, The Epoch Times. I was interested in a headline: ‘Depression Set to Be Top Global Disease by 2030’. The headline fits in with an opinion I have held for a long time – that...
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Woodbrooke in winter
Daybreak unveiled a visitation of the ghost of snow: breath of cold condensed on treetops, blades of white grass like raised hackles, the blue and rose of dawn blanched and transfixed.
The Nayler Passion
‘There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end.’ These words of James Nayler are amongst the best loved in Quaker literature, and form the...
A very Quaker Jesus
Noel Moules has written his new book with several purposes in mind. In Fingerprints of Fire, Footprints of Peace: A spiritual manifesto from a Jesus perspective, he writes for anyone wanting to explore fresh possibilities, for those who are seeking and for those who are just looking for common ground...
Eye - 04 January 2013
A Friendly city? Friends have been riffling through the pages of their bookshelves for curiosities to share. This week with we have literary finds on a historical theme. Jill Allum, of Beccles Meeting, raves about Jerusalem, the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, which she describes as ‘a tour de force’....