Issue 25-01-2019
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Walking the talk
As we look around our communities, country and the wider world we see much cause for heartache. It is easy to be overwhelmed. Where can we start to play our part in bringing change? That is how I felt as a student in London in 1963. So, amongst other things, I...
Top stories
Speaking truth to each other
‘Speak truth to power’ is a phrase – some might say a cliché – that rolls easily off the tongues of modern-day Quakers. As far as I understand it, the intention behind the phrase is to speak the truth – as we perceive and experience it, and from the perspective of our collective...
Bereavement
The loss of a close relationship is widely recognised as one of the most stressful of all experiences. A gathering of the ‘Mental health in Meetings’ group, drawn from Leicester Area Meeting Friends, in November 2017, focused upon what we may be able to learn from others’ experiences of bereavement and...
An open door
I became aware of Quakers as a child when my family moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, in the United States, which is adjacent to Sandy Spring, the location of a community of Quakers founded in the early eighteenth century. I had spent my first ten years in the UK, in...
How a Catholic mass made me a Quaker
A few months ago, for family reasons, my daughter and I were invited to stay in a Benedictine community as personal guests of the Abbot. It was a singular experience for two non-Catholic females. If we found taking our meals in silence before a plaster figure of Christ bleeding on...
‘Live simply so others may simply live’
In August last year, a fifteen-year-old girl, Greta Thunberg, decided to sit outside the Swedish parliament rather than go to school. Education has little point, she said, if the politicians continue to ignore climate facts. A few weeks later, she addressed 10,000 people in Helsinki, Finland. ‘Today we use 100 million barrels...
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Bristol Friend’s plaque for local suffragists
A Friend from Redland Meeting in Bristol has played a key role in the putting up of a blue plaque to commemorate the city’s ‘nonmilitant’ suffrage campaigners. Lucienne Boyce, of Redland Meeting, campaigned for the blue plaque to be installed at 3 West Mall, Clifton to mark the home of...
New winter shelter opens in London
Quaker Homeless Action (QHA) has opened a new winter shelter in London in partnership with the Simon Community.
BYM to cover immigration advice costs
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) has pledged to cover the costs of immigration advice for its EU employees seeking to apply for settled status following Brexit.
QSA discusses funeral poverty on radio
Quaker Social Action (QSA) took part in a BBC Radio Four programme last week to discuss funeral poverty. Claire Brandon, manager of QSA’s ‘Down to Earth’ campaign, spoke to presenter Joan Bakewell on We Need To Talk About Death on 19 January about how to have an affordable and meaningful...
Quakers offer prayers for Nairobi
The Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) has encouraged ‘Quakers around the world to hold our Friends in Nairobi in prayer’.
Children’s Meeting funds three camels in Ethiopia
Children from a Quaker Meeting in Ireland have raised enough money to buy three camels in Ethiopia. Rathfarnham Meeting in Dublin used €300, which the children made from a cake, book and plant sale in May. The stall included sunflowers grown from seeds planted during a Children’s Meeting in April...
Letters - 25 January 2019
Small steps to sustainability It’s easy to feel paralysed by the scale of potential worldwide disaster. Instead, how can we move forward positively? David Attenborough told a recent UN conference that, with help, we can all identify and take small steps in simple everyday actions. He encourages a positive...