Issue 10-07-2015
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Sunday Meeting
A pocket of silence to slip into Where warmth and quietness rule Waiting for the fidgeting to subside. – The rustle of a raincoat – The creak of an old bench – The tick of the clock measuring...
Top stories
Taxes for peace
The centenary of the first world war presents an important opportunity for Friends to question how well we are actively living our Peace Testimony. As the last Friends who personally experienced military tribunals for conscientious objection reach advanced age, we feel called to ask: how well are we maintaining their...
Meeting for Sufferings: The beating heart
The first Meeting for Sufferings of the new triennium was held at Friends House, London on Saturday 4 July. The tone for the morning was set with an arresting image during opening worship, where a parallel was drawn between what the heart is to the body and what Meeting for Sufferings...
Meeting for Sufferings: Yearly Meeting minutes sent for action
Minutes from Britain Yearly Meeting 2015 have been sent to Meeting for Sufferings for action. The first of these was minute 25: Responding to social inequality and injustice: housing as a tested concern. The second was Minute 36: Living out our faith in the world – are we ready to meet the challenge? This...
Meeting for Sufferings: Concern for refugees
East Kent Area Meeting sent a minute to Sufferings regarding the need for a ‘policy on safe ways of allowing refugees to reach Europe to claim asylum’. The subject was introduced by Helen Drewery, general secretary of Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW). She said that there is a refugee...
A vision for Wales
The Quaker Meeting house at Dolobran was built in 1700 and stands in a remote and lovely setting near Meifod. The Lloyd family, on whose land the Meeting house was built, had known a good deal of persecution and many Friends from that region emigrated to Pennsylvania from the 1680s onward.
All articles
Finding peace and justice
Nimrod Evron is an Israeli citizen who stands in opposition to Israeli state policy and the occupation. He has played a pivotal role in setting up organisations working with youth who oppose conscription and is currently studying for an MA at Birkbeck College, London. The Liverpool Quaker Peace Group invited...
The Pop-Up Tea Shop
Wandsworth Meeting House is an anonymous looking building on a prime site in the high street. It is situated opposite the Town Hall and just around the corner from a busy shopping centre. Thousands of people walk past the Meeting house and never even notice us, so our Outreach Committee...
Tom Robinson
The year is 1978. I am about to leave school and face an uncertain future. Change is in the air. Margaret Thatcher is nipping at the ankles of socialism. Against the background of a London filled with rubbish and Thatcher promising change, Tom Robinson is singing some great songs. Tom is...
Kirchentag 2015
We have just returned from an extraordinary event held over four days in Stuttgart: the Deutsche Evangelische Kirchentag. The event has its origins in 1949 at the end of an Evangelical Week in Hannover. It was begun as a lay movement following the isolation of the church from the state during...
Fountains of ideas
The most unexpected gift of spending six weeks, as an Eva Koch Scholar, at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham was the stimulation of the seemingly free-form conversations with the other Scholars. These, on occasions, ran on late into the night, sparking off ideas left and right, and sometimes...
Eye - 10 July 2015
Quaking Quakers Friends in Newbury are under threat from redevelopment plans for the town. In an article sent to their local paper, entitled ‘Quakers quaking over redevelopment plans’, Friends draw residents’ attention to the potential loss of the Meeting house if redevelopment plans go ahead. Friends write: ‘Quakers have been...
Letters - 10 June 2015
Seeds of peace I welcome John Lampen’s articles (12 and 19 June) and Alastair McIntosh’s highlighting of key questions concerning the Quaker approach to conciliation (19 June). There is, of course, no Quaker monopoly of good work in this important area. Quakers often work with non-Quaker colleagues. There is, however, a...