Issue 17-03-2017
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Sharing love
Seventy years on, I am back at school. Under the keen eye of my teacher, my four-year-old granddaughter Emily, alias ‘Miss Rainbow’, I am learning my numbers one to ten. This cosy encounter recalls childhood memories, as joyful as they are salutary.
Top stories
Quakers and youth hostels
At the outset of the youth hostel movement Jack Catchpool and Barclay Baron, who was the first chairman of Youth Hostels Association (YHA) and who had been brought up as a Quaker but became a member of the Church of England, insisted that there should be no test for anyone...
Taxes for peace
With fewer than fifty people attending, this event certainly wasn’t a ‘rally’. However, Conscience – Taxes for Peace began its Taxes for Peace Bill Rally, which was held at Friends House on 27 February, with a real call for action. It came in a dramatic form, by video, in actor and...
No room?
Ioften feel proud to be British – and occasionally very ashamed. One such occasion was when our government said they would only admit 350 unaccompanied refugee children into Britain, instead of the 3,000 pledged and enacted in law in an amendment to the Immigration Act 2016. Alf Dubs, author of the amendment, had come...
Observing Quaker bureaucracy
I attended Meeting for Sufferings in early February as a substitute alternate for our Area Meeting and found myself slipping into the role of observer rather than participant – a position more comfortable than reflecting, spiritually, on all the agenda items. Indeed, this seems to be an almost impossible task.
Reflections on the ‘Red Book’: True spiritual experience
‘Imprisonment… offers some protection to society by removing the offender. But consider how limited that protection is compared to what it could be. It puts the offender against property into a place where he is deprived of opportunities to practise the social rules about property; it puts the violent man...
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Quakers in slaughterhouse vigil
Quaker Concern for Animals (QCA) joined Oxfordshire Animal Save on 3 March for an act of witness at a slaughterhouse near Witney in Oxfordshire.
Solitary confinement of children
An urgent challenge to a teenage boy’s ‘prolonged solitary confinement’ in a London prison will be heard in the High Court.
Faith should be a basic human right
The right to believe in God the way you want, and to practice a faith the way you believe, is a basic human right World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Olav Fykse Tveit told a side event of the 34th session of the UN Human Rights Council on 7 March.
Call for convictions to be quashed
One hundred years after the conviction of a leading woman figure in the anti-war movement campaigners are calling for a review of her case by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC).
Headley Brothers sold
Headley Brothers Limited of Ashford in Kent, printers of the Friend magazine for sixty-five years, went into administration on the morning of 2 March and a deal for the 130-year-old business was completed in the afternoon.
Friends at Hay Festival
A panel of Quaker speakers will take part as a main stage event at this year’s Hay Book Festival. The names of those participating in the event on Sunday 28 May will be released soon.
Exploration into God
As a student of the Cathars, and a Quaker concerned with the spiritual challenge of our times, the age old question of a battle between the forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is a subject of meditation. It seems that evil coalesces into hierarchies of power and control in the world,...
Stillness
For years I followed Buddhism. It has a lot of useful teachings: impermanence, no separate self and mindfulness. Is this enough for me to become fully human?
A snowdrop in our midst
The wind from the east blows wild, And so I know I am alive; Despite the freezing snow.
Letters - 17 March 2017
Speaking out on climate change Climate change is too doom-laden a topic to look square in the face for many Friends, as Sue Holden’s letter (3 March) implies. As an environmental scientist myself, I can face climate change and not despair. There are many things that we can all do,...