Issue 21-02-2020
Featured story
‘Despite all that silence Bildad doesn’t seem to have done much listening.’
According to Wikipedia, there are at least three countries that claim to host the tomb of the Old Testament character Job. Being buried multiple times might seem fitting for the author of a book about why bad things happen to good people, but it also speaks to his influence among...
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‘There are now many hundreds of refugees in the Calais area.’
Obsessed with repairing as many sleeping bags as possible from the giant pile, I focus on nothing but my fingers, pliers, needles, and thread upon zips. I do this exclusively for four days. The work is one of themes and variations. The theme is zips, and one variation is finding...
‘While others despair of all men we must despair of no man.’
History never repeats itself; but throughout the story of the race, epoch-making movements similar in many respects take their rise. These are sometimes closely associated with great personalities; at other times we see mass movements which seem to possess no great outstanding figure as leader. In all we may observe...
‘Singing is transformative. It lifts our spirits; it heals; it is creative.’
Imagine being in bed and finally asleep after a tense day. Then, before dawn, before the cocks crow, a terrible loud hammering on the door. Your children wail, startled from their sleep. Men burst in and then there is chaos. Now you are elsewhere, still in your night clothes, not...
‘The Time for Peace is Now: Gospel music about us’ – Various Artists
When Pops Staples first got his family together to sing it was at his brother’s church. It was 1948, with all that meant for a black musical group in the USA, even one touring churches: segregation, harrassment and worse. But one of those churches was Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in...
‘Peace Camping: A history’ by Michael Waugh
In his many years of campaigning against nuclear weapons, Michael Waugh has taken part in a large number of Peace Camps, some well known and some barely known beyond the activist community. He has established a reputation for encyclopaedic knowledge of the peace movement, which has led him to put...
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Friends in 1,500-strong protest at British Museum
Quakers were among 1,500 people who took part in a mass creative protest on Saturday 8 February. The protest was part of a fifty-one-hour occupation against BP sponsorship at the British Museum this month. The three-day mass ‘creative takeover’ of the museum started on 7 February when a giant BP-branded Trojan Horse arrived...
JRF poverty report
The risk of poverty has risen for workers in families with children, according to the Quaker-founded Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF).
End Bahrain complicity, says Roots
The Quaker group Roots of Resistance (RoR) stepped up its campaign against the University of Huddersfield this month calling for the institution to end ‘its complicity’ with the Bahraini regime, which has been condemned for torture and human rights abuses.
‘Modern slavery is all around’
Modern slavery is all around, a Richmond Quaker told nineteen Friends last month at a London Quakers gathering. Rebecca Baumgartner, a civil servant whose work for the last four years has focused on tackling slavery, spoke at Kingston Meeting House on 30 January as part of an event called Free Me.
Florence Meeting celebrates first birthday
Quakers in Florence celebrated their first birthday this month, at the same time as a local magazine published a feature about them.
Bolton Friend’s film in LGBT+ festival
A Quaker from Bolton Meeting will have her film about ‘coming out’ as a gay teenager shown at the Museum of Liverpool this week. Nan to the Rescue by Rosie Adamson-Clark and directed by Mel Plumley tells the story ‘of a teenage girl coming out in the 1980s in a...
Letters - 21 February 2020
A happy reader I have found recent articles in the Friend, including the book reviews (say the past four months or more), very intellectually and emotionally stimulating and informative – congrats to the new editor and his team. I especially liked: the article on Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for...