Reviews Articles
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Worshipful space
Recently I was lucky enough to be able to attend Meeting for Worship at Live Oak Friends Meeting in Houston, Texas. On a still, calm, warm morning, the simple ‘early’ Meeting was profoundly quiet. The sounds of birdsong from the surrounding trees and gardens were woven through by the haunting… -
What is Evil?
My wife and I once ran a course at Woodbrooke on responding to evil, in which painful experiences were lovingly shared. But three participants were dissatisfied. They wanted metaphysics: is evil real, or is it only a shadow, the absence of good? What is its power? Can it control us…
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Living Adventurously
‘Before we love others we need to love ourselves. How do we treasure our own Light and gifts. How do we learn to share what we have to offer? Do you seek to find the place where your own talents and the world’s needs meet?’ This is number one of…
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The new peace politics
From Pacification to Peacebuilding by Diana Francis. Pluto Press. ISBN 978 0 7453 3026 6. £13.99. I received this book for review together with Paul Lacey’s Swarthmore Lecture The unequal world we inhabit. Paul argued that Friends have made nonviolence a shibboleth; if we take seriously the ‘responsibility to protect’…
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Facing the challenge: The Friends Quarterly Prize essays
We have a stark choice before us. Are we going to actively address the key issues that face us in the twenty-first century and bring our Quaker way to bear on them, corporately and individually? Or will we simply be taken over by them and let Quakerism become obsolete. So…
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The Swarthmore Lecture 2010
Paul Lacey’s lecture ‘The unequal world we inhabit’ has the subtitle ‘Quaker responses to terrorism and fundamentalism’. He is a scholar and uses research and analysis rather than first-hand stories. He writes as an ordinary person trying to understand phenomena that baffle and frighten us all and asks: ‘As a… -
Communication is the key
Special Interest Groups: Quaker Committee for Christian and Interfaith Relations (QCCIR) and The Kindlers. These special interest groups focused – as did some of the main sessions – on issues around communication. In the first, David Cornick, of Churches Together in England, talked about the state of ecumenical and interfaith… -
The Journal of Elias Hicks
The Journal of Elias Hicks, editor Paul Buckley. Inner Light Books. ISBN 978 0 9797110 5 3. £18. Hicks is of great importance in Quaker history. After 1827 there was a significant rift in American Quakerism with neither side recognising the other. After this, other American Yearly Meetings split. The…
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Trust: lost and re-found
Trust: How we lost it and how to get it back by Anthony Seldon. Biteback Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-84954-001-8. £8.99. Only in 2002 did I realise that a breakdown in trust was not just a personal worry when Onora O’Neill gave her BBC Reith Lecture ‘A Question of Trust’. After listing… -
Faith versus reason in ancient Alexandria
At first sight, Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora, one of the current crop of cinematic ancient world blockbusters, would seem to confirm all the prejudices about Christianity into which Friends are prone to lapse. Irrational and credulous, intolerant and misogynist: the emerging Christians of fourth century Alexandria are an unappealing lot. How…
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