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.
Human existence, let alone advancement, is a continual work in progress. The Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ is a jagged graph, never a smooth line. Positive achievements on the one hand can be offset by intense distress on the other. Pestilence, famine, war (hot and cold), poverty, exploitation, and climate, all limit the size and health of the population, of the economy and of its politics.
Last month I was in Stockholm for a few days, prior to heading to Svartbäcken (a Quaker retreat centre in a forest lakeside setting north of the city) to participate in a Quaker Voluntary Action working retreat.
When Russia invaded Ukraine I didn’t know what to say when people asked me, ‘Well what would Quakers actually do?’ Five years on, with the demands to spend 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence ricocheting around, I still don’t have an answer that does justice to the question and the questioners. Of course, I can and do say that building peace is much more important than preparing for war, and that war never achieves anything, and that killing people never gets us anywhere. And of course I point to all the usual, important arguments: NATO countries (excluding the US), already outspend Russia on defence by three to one in cash terms. Why would increasing this to 4:1 help? And, given that the US-made Trident missiles which launch our ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent have to be serviced by the US, who would now trust Donald Trump not to augment these Trident missiles to make them rather less independent?
In John Lampen’s article on ‘International disorder’ (14 August) he gave a list of Quakers who have made a positive contribution in this field. I would like to extend that list to include Sydney Bailey.
Naomi Alderman’s Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today describes our time as an ‘information crisis’, comparable with the upheavals that followed the invention of the printing press. The speed and abundance of information – and disinformation – have transformed how we interact with one another, and society struggles to withstand the change. For Friends, this raises a spiritual question: how do we seek truth, unity and love in an environment that so readily promotes division?
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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