The Friend is a weekly magazine in which Friends speak to each other and to the wider world, offering their insight, ideas, news, nurture and inspiration.
Nurturing Quaker community, each issue offers a space for Friends to share their concerns, and to support each other in faith and witness.
The Friend: enriching, inspiring and connecting the Quaker community since 1843.
Friends have long sought to be faithful to conscience, even when that requires courage. Throughout history, Quakers have challenged systems and institutions that they believed were inconsistent with compassion, justice, and spiritual integrity. Today, another system raises difficult questions of conscience: factory farming.
I am not ‘against’ anyone. I am for peace. I am against certain ideas and certain actions. Feeling an increasing call to be an activist in these turbulent times, how can I avoid being set against people? How can I be active for peace?
Approach old age with courage and hope. As far as possible, make arrangements for your care in good time… Pray that in your final years you may be enabled to find new ways of receiving and reflecting God’s love. Advices & queries 29
Friends don’t like talking about money. Not really. Not in detail. It’s on the list of things you’re not supposed to talk about: politics, religion, money. I wonder what is left, but I am not skilful at chitchat.
At first the name did not ring a bell.
The face, yes, the face – that came back to me.
And that smile, diffident, frank, quietly noble.
We did not engage in long conversations.
No shattering of earth, of mind, of soul.
A sense, somehow, that, if only for a moment,
we were in a good place – together.
So often I have heard Friends reflecting on, and discerning a response to, human suffering in ministry. These past few weeks I have been preoccupied with little else, after having visited this exhibition, an immersive account of the murder, rape and kidnapping of festivalgoers in Israel on 7 October 2023.
Omer Bartov was born and brought up in Israel, and though he now lives in the US, most of his best friends are in Israel. Until the Gaza war, he visited frequently. His eldest son lives in Tel Aviv. Bartov is an academic, and his interests include the history of Israel, antisemitism and the Holocaust. He is well qualified to write this book.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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