Issue 26-06-2015
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Our relationships
I am 83 and intend to start a debate about how we oldies ought to manage. We have been dealt a double whammy by fate. For some 800,000 years of man we had several advantages that the last one hundred years have swept away. We had a lot of experience of the...
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Jeremiah Dixieland?
Was an entire region of what is now the United States of America nicknamed after a Durham Quaker? As a Friend living in County Durham, it is a question that has some fascination for me. The region in question is the South, or the Southern States, and the Quaker is...
A fresh perspective
At Yearly Meeting I heard many inspiring stories about ways in which Friends are living out our faith in the world; but, at the same time, I looked round the gathering with a feeling of concern bordering on dismay. Almost every head was either grey or white. A Local Meeting...
From the archive: Yearly Meeting 1915
It is almost impossible to summarise the Yearly Meeting of 1915. The Friend reported it in a double issue on May 28th and the following issue of June 4th, with detailed reports of the contributions in the sessions as well as the meetings held beforehand, such as the Swarthmore lecture on...
Boots and blue berets
Why are most of our major political parties so devoted to Trident, the nuclear-powered submarine that can be within devastation distance of any city in the world without anyone knowing? They say it’s an essential deterrent. The cost of keeping this weapon system updated is huge. In January this...
Peace on the agenda at Adderbury
This year’s Adderbury Gathering took as its topic Peace, peacemaking and Islam. A one hundred-strong audience travelled to the historic Oxfordshire Meeting house on 21 June to hear Islamic scholar Hojjat Ramzy speak on co-existence, self-correction and forgiveness.
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Friends back ‘End Austerity Now’
Quakers were among tens of thousands of activists who took part in last Saturday’s End Austerity Now marches in Britain.
Friends in climate change call
Some eighty Quakers were among several thousand people who took part in the UK’s largest mass climate change day of action on Wednesday 17 June.
Release of The Unseen March
The increasing influence of the military in schools is questioned in The Unseen March, a new film developed by Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW) on behalf of Britain Yearly Meeting.
New addition at Northfield
Andrew Callan has joined the management committee at the Northfield Eco-centre, a Central England Quakers project in Birmingham.
Letters – 26 June 2015
Divestment Everything we buy and all we do depends on fossil fuels to a greater or lesser extent. Our food, our clothes, our furnishings, our communications and our leisure. We eat chicken, lay carpets, use computers, read books, travel… It is virtually impossible to divest from all our involvement with...
Consider the Rock
Terry Hobday has written a short but challenging pamphlet, which both tells a personal story and poses a number of important questions about the way Quakers in Britain view their worship practice and conduct their outreach work: Consider the Rock: Some reflections on the founding and development of an experimental...