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.
If Christ is a book of imagining, the pages are his mind and body; the letters are his voice and gestures, his standing still and walking.
At the end of June, I embarked on a trip to Geneva to spend two weeks with the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO). I shan’t lie: I was sceptical.
Do you respect that of God in everyone though it may be expressed in unfamiliar ways or be difficult to discern?… Listen patiently and seek the truth which other people’s opinions may contain for you.
From Advices & queries 17
Friends do not use blessings: the word is not in the index of Quaker faith & practice. Why not? Obviously Quakers reject the traditional church blessing, ‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost’, the priest mediating between God and the congregation. But there is a whole other tradition of blessing from Celtic Christianity, which can be used by anyone.
A few years ago, two walking guides were published: Friends Way 1 and Friends Way 2 (see ‘By the way’, 13 May 2022, and News 16 June 2023). As someone who has enjoyed completing long-distance walks in the UK, I bought both books and suggested to my daughter that we could have a go.
I finally came to my senses reading an in-your-face article by Oliver Milman in the Guardian.
It was titled ‘Climate Crisis up-side? Banks say air-conditioning firms will thrive’. It reported that, while the world is on track for climate catastrophe, this will create an opportunity for air-conditioning companies, and we should be investing in them now. One should have put a lot of cash into air-conditioning in 2025, in fact.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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