Issue 01-04-2016
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Hope and Light
Time passes so quickly it seems, even in prison. It seems like yesterday that I was in a darkness I had never experienced before. My thanks to my Quaker mentor still lingers in my mind. Over three years have passed and, by way of different prisons, support and kindness from...
Top stories
Footholds for reform
I became director of the Prison Reform Trust in spring 2000. A few months after my arrival, in a meeting with the then chair of the charity, Douglas Hurd, I sought his advice about saying the same things about penal reform over and over again. We discussed the humanity and common...
Choosing love after violence
Last week a man killed himself and more than twenty other people at a metro station about 200 metres from Quaker House Brussels. Two other explosions at the airport killed eleven others. In total, more than 300 people were injured. These traumatic events will change their lives, and those of their families.
Outreach
I start the weekend with Love. I have been stressed, and arrive with my protective masks on. I meet one whose strong love is particularly beautiful – you know Quakers like this – and knowing I will be truly heard by her, I am able to take off my protective masks and...
PeaceJam
‘It’s changed my life!’ This is not a phrase teenagers often use about a school trip connected with peace education. It’s Monday morning back in school after a weekend at the UK PeaceJam conference in Winchester, and students from The Mount and Sidcot schools are buzzing about their...
Carmichael controversy prompts concerns
Six leading Scottish academics are among those who have made public their concerns over the confusion that has resulted from a recent decision by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRRT) Ltd. to help pay the legal fees of the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael.
All articles
It all adds up for QSA
Quaker Social Action (QSA) has turned its attention towards the criminal justice sector with its latest financial education project, ‘Adds Up’.
Investigation gives nod to Quaker legacy
A recent episode of Channel 4’s investigative current affairs programme Dispatches focused on the Cadbury chocolate firm, contrasting current business practices with those of its Quaker founders.
Archive of eighteenth century Friend goes online
The diaries, letters and notebooks of Yorkshire’s Joseph Wood are now online, part of the University of Leeds’ Quaker collections.
Vibrancy in Meetings appointment made
Rachel Matthews has been appointed national coordinator for the Vibrancy in Meetings programme.
Photography and conflict
Last December an exhibition of work by the photographer Don McCullin was held at Hauser and Wirth in Bruton entitled ‘Conflict, people, landscape’. The show ran until the end of January 2016. I followed the exhibition online and was interested in the responses to it. I loved it: fifty-five powerful images...
Treasure beneath the hearth
The Quaker approach to the Christian scriptures is a radical one, not well understood either among Friends, nor the wider Christian community. George Fox and Robert Barclay were always clear that they valued not so much the words of scripture, as the Spirit, the source from which those words sprang ...
What the mystics knew
Richard Rohr is a seventy-three-year-old American Franciscan. He has been writing about spirituality for a long time, and it’s beginning to show. He seems to have something like an ageing writer’s version of in vino veritas, which may be interpreted thus: ‘Damn it all! I’m going to...
Letters - 1 April 2016
Grace-full Quakers The moment I read Rosalind Smith’s ‘Thought for the Week’ (4 March) ‘Grace-full Quakers’ I was instantly reminded of a hymn sung recently at a funeral/memorial service I attended. It is by Richard Gillard (born 1953) and goes like this: Brother, sister, let me serve you, Let me...