Issue 06-01-2017
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Don’t complain!
I learnt recently that Rabia Basri, the female Sufi saint of the eighth century, warned us not to complain. This advice spoke to my heart, but I had to think carefully about it. Did she want to stop us challenging injustice and disrespect? No. Judging by other sayings she did...
Top stories
Structures and the Spirit
My small Local Meeting, like most others, gathers a varied collection of worshippers: a peace campaigner, a financier, a physiotherapist, a street pastor, the chair of a local housing association, a teacher and others. Each Sunday the living depth of our stillness gathers, lightens and heals our concerns, our failures...
A factor unknown
When our daughter was a little girl she asked me: ‘Daddy, is there a God?’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘otherwise there would be no word for it.’ But as the philosopher Cyril E M Joad used to say on the radio programme The Brains Trust, it all depends what you...
Being mortal
Anyone who has a parent, or hopefully two, who are, let us say, getting on a bit, or are themselves in their later years, should find Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, written by American doctor Atul Gawande, compulsory reading.
Ministry on death
Last year my friend, a Quaker, was admitted to hospital and it soon seemed likely that he would die. I visited him hoping, at best, to give comfort. Unlike others, I do not have any detailed idea of an afterlife or how it might happen. Even if we had such...
Quakers and Brexit
Heard the one about the bishop, the Turner Prize winner and the Quaker? The Church of England has ‘jumped on a middle class bandwagon of horror at the Brexit vote’. So thunders Philip North, the bishop of Burnley, writing recently in the Church Times. There had been ‘an almighty cry...
All articles
Prison, ecology and stewardship
What image do you have of prison and the prison community? Perhaps you see high walls and ‘razor’ topped fences? You might imagine groups of thugs and villains moping around not doing anything useful.
Quaker renewal: Spiritual generosity
For many years, Quakers in Britain have been deeply reluctant to share the riches of the Quaker way with others. We have labelled any attempt to welcome potential new Friends as ‘proselytising’, but as Paul Parker, recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting, has pointed out: ‘There is a big difference...
Letters - 06 January 2017
Peace and beauty This is an account of Quaker outreach in Lincoln. At last, we were ready to take a small table and chairs to the High Street where we were going to make and distribute origami ‘Peace Cranes’ – a Japanese symbol of peace. When the atomic bomb was dropped...