Issue 07-02-2020
Featured story
‘We’ve all had the emotionally jaw-dropping experience of a new, deeper perspective emerging via art
How can we tell the difference between something real, and something fictional, or unreal? One answer is that for something to count as real it must be something we can encounter. We encounter another vehicle when we collide with it. We do not encounter the yeti, or the unicorn in...
Top stories
‘They always include praise or loving address to the divine.’
This year, as every year, the documents published in advance of Yearly Meeting will include the collection of ‘Testimonies to the grace of God’ as shown in the lives of Friends who have died. At Yearly Meeting itself, a Friend will read two or three of them aloud. An earlier...
‘The Offbeat Bible: The old stories retold’, by Paul Hunt
Modernisations of Bible stories go back, in English, at least to the eighth-century Dream of the Rood, in which the Crucifixion is narrated by the cross itself. Before the Reformation, such rewritings, supplementing the sketchy narratives of the Bible, generally aimed to increase the readers’/hearers’ devotion. Now the picture...
‘The idea emerged of an international campaign.’
In 2007 I marched alongside 25,000 landless people, from Gwalior to New Delhi on the Jan Adesh march, to protest about them being turned off their land. Negotiations took place, but little progress was made and so there was another march in 2012 [the Jan Satyagraha march] to consolidate the gains. It was...
Meeting for Sufferings: New clerks
Opening her first Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) as clerk, Margaret Bryan welcomed members and introduced the new assistant clerk, Robert Card.
Meeting for Sufferings: QCEA report
Josh Habgood-Coote, one of two Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) representatives to the Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA) General Assembly, presented the organisation’s triennial report to MfS.
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Meeting for Sufferings: Trustees report
Caroline Nursey, clerk of BYM trustees, began by noting that trustees had not met since the last MfS. ‘So I haven’t got anything new to bring back and discuss with you.’ Instead she hoped the session would be a chance to get input on some of the matters trustees...
Meeting for Sufferings: Speaking out
In 2014, MfS adopted procedures for ‘speaking out’ by Yearly Meeting and other Meetings and groups. While the procedures are clear, what Friends speak about and whether speech is the right way to address a given issue can be less clear.
Quaker speaks at Climate Assembly UK
A leading Quaker environmental expert spoke at the first weekend of Climate Assembly UK held in Birmingham last month.
Q&B trustee calls for gender pay gap action
A Quakers & Business (Q&B) Group trustee has called for employers to be more mindful of fair pay and work to correct the gender pay gap. In a guest blog called ‘A route to fair pay’ for The Equality Trust, Stuart Hill, Q&B membership secretary, pointed...
Central England Quakers ‘Pray24Brum’
Bull Street Meeting House hosted this year’s ‘Pray24Brum’ event in which seekers from different Christian traditions come together to pray.
155 students at Exeter Meeting
One hundred and fifty-five school pupils visited Exeter Meeting House to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. The six school groups of students aged between eight and fifteen came to the Meeting as part of a Religious Education (RE) trip organised by the RE advisor for the Standing Advisory Council on Religious...
Friends on ‘how we live together’
Two Friends from Oxford Meeting appeared in The Guardian newspaper last month talking about their experiences of sharing a home. In the interview for the ‘How we live together’ section on 25 January, Friends Marie and Lynette described how they became housemates through networks at Oxford Meeting House.
Salisbury Friends host repair café
A ‘repair café’ hosted by Salisbury Meeting has saved over 200 kilograms of waste from landfill, according to local Friends.
Letters - 7 February 2020
Gospel diversity Janet Scott (17 January) questions whether John’s gospel corrects or complements the three synoptic gospels. Modern critical scholarship offers another possibility. It is now widely accepted that all four gospels were written many years after the death of Jesus and it seems clear that each reflects the different...