Issue 18-25-12-2009
Featured Story
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Greetings
‘And when the time called Christmas came, while others were feasting and sporting themselves I would have gone and looked out poor widows from house to house, and have given them some money.’ George Fox, writing in his Journal, in a slightly disparaging manner about Christmas. It is a season…
Top Stories
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A view from Copenhagen
A cacophony of colour, music and chanting flooded the streets of Copenhagen on Saturday 12 December as 100,000 activists marched to the city’s Bella Centre, where the UN Climate Change Summit is taking place. I travelled to Copenhagen with over a hundred other Christian Aid supporters from the UK. We…
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Christmas in the West Bank
This time last year I had two Christmases. The first, Western Christmas, was spent in the tiny village of Yanoun on the outskirts of Nablus in the West Bank. I was one of a team of four Ecumenical Accompaniers (EAs) based in the village. I stayed in the village over…
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An Evangelical Friends’ Christmas
Every Evangelical Friends Meeting we have attended considers Christmas a celebration of great importance since it celebrates the birth of Jesus and thus the arrival of the long-promised Saviour. Christmas for Evangelical Friends is a season for personally reminding ourselves that God’s love for each of us is fulfilled in…
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No Christmas tree…
A friend asked me the other day when I last had a Christmas tree. I told him 1991. What happened after that? Well 1992 was the first year I volunteered for Quaker Open Christmas (now the ‘Quaker Christmas Shelter’). As I recall (and my dad may tell a different story),…
All Articles
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Christmas Cheer from Copenhagen?
Climate change is a complex, messy and huge problem. At the time of the Friend going to press, the antidote being brewed in Copenhagen seems complex, messy and inadequate. Negotiators are working on two main documents. Both are full of the square brackets used to indicate alternative possible wording and… -
Celebration or challenge?
One of the first ‘odd’ things I learned about Quakers was that Quaker children went to school and Quaker businesses operated at Christmas. But then I researched the history of Christmas on the web and I was quite surprised. It seems that the Quakers weren’t the only ones opposing Christmas… -
Wartime Christmas memories
In Bournville Meeting at Christmas time last year, a Friend was moved to speak about an unusual event in which he had been involved many years ago. It was not normally part of his duties to act as a courier for the government, but on one occasion he was asked… -
A German Christmas
Plans made while I darned socks at Bedales now came into being. I had an au-pair situation in Bremen, North German and, having taken in all that ‘Gesundheit’ had told me to do, I booked a passage on Germany’s largest passenger ship, as I thought it would be a nicer… -
Every day can be Christmas day for a Quaker
Luke is the only evangelist who tells us how the shepherds in the field were urged by angels to search for the child in the stable. The angels set out and find Jesus in a manger at Bethlehem (meaning the Bread House). Is this a romantic story of two thousand… -
Three thousand years from Galilee to the world
A History of Christianity: the first three thousand years by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Allan Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books. ISBN: 978 0 713 99869 6. £35 The size alone is impressive. Comprising 1,161 pages including almost sixty pages of index, seventy-seven pages of notes and fourteen pages of suggested further… -
Beck & Ball’s The London Friends’ Meetings
From my time on the staff of Friends House Library, I knew William Beck and T Frederick Ball’s 1869 The London Friends’ Meetings as ‘Beck & Ball’, the book to show historians the lie of the land before they explore volumes of minutes and other detailed evidence. Olive Yarrow from… -
Excerpts from ‘Southwark Monthly Meeting, etc’, a chapter of The London Friends’ Meetings
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Holding it together
We are all made of glue by Marina Lewycka. Fig Tree (Penguin Group). ISBN 978 1 905 49022 6. Hardback: £18.99 Georgie Sinclair, the heroine of this delightful novel, edits the trade magazine Adhesives in the Modern World. About as exciting as a history of tractors in Ukrainian, you might… -
Baking Cakes in Kigali
Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin. Atlantic Books (Grove Atlantic Ltd). ISBN 978 1 84354 7471. Paperback: £7.99 ‘Like the Ladies Detective Agency but in Rwanda’, screams the cover of this edition. And the back. The fear with this book is that it only made the shelves because the… -
Letters to my granchildren
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Social by Social
Social by Social by Andy Gibson, Nigel Courtney, Amy Sample Ward, David Wilcox and Clive Holtham. Published online at www.socialbysocial.com. ISBN 978 1 906496 41 8. Free download, or print copy at £9.99 incl. UK postage. Lots of people are nervous of computers and the big web of connections that’s…
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