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.
‘To Friends around the world: loving Greetings to Friends everywhere. Gyfeillion annwyl ym mhobman, anfonwn atoch ein cariad a’n cyfarchion.
Battered by the certainty of some of those around us, we seem to live in a world polarised by conflict and fear. The world around us appears even more frightening and unstable than it did last year, and yet we experienced deep joy at being able to come together.
The Opening Session of Yearly Meeting (YM)began with Siobhán Haire, deputy recording clerk, expressing optimism: ‘This year we’re going to have at least one, and possibly two, sessions in which nobody’s mobile phone goes off. Can you assist me in realising that dream?’
Rachel Shabi seemed genuinely moved to be asked by Quakers to present this year’s Salter Lecture. Indeed, she began not in the present crisis in the Middle East, but with Alfred and Ada Salter – Quakers whose lives of patient, principled service had modelled what it means to live universal values with moral consistency. Their witness reminded us, she said, that transformation rarely comes through grand gestures, but through steady faithfulness: small acts of justice, repeated without weariness. From there, Rachel traced a thread forward to modern voices such as Angela Davis and Ruha Benjamin, both insisting that a better world must be imagined before it can be built, and that care enacted locally can ripple outward.
Stuart Masters was billed to explore ‘the diverse mix of characteristics visible in the early Quaker movement that produced several creative tensions which subsequent generations have had to navigate’. His lecture, organised by Woodbrooke, certainly delivered. In a seventy-five-minute tour of Quaker history at Friends House, the Woodbrooke associate tutor managed to give a fascinating historical glimpse into the challenges and inspirations of Friends over the centuries, and pitch probing insights into how these can help today. Charsimatic or Quietist? Prophetic or pragmatic? Inward-looking or outward-acting? Contemplative or noisy?
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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