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.
In the garden of Houghton Hall in Norfolk there is an installation by the artist Jeppe Hein.
When British Friends refer to Pendle Hill, we usually mean the actual hill in Lancashire where George Fox wrote: ‘From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered.’ But our destination earlier this year was Pendle Hill in the USA, the Quaker study, retreat and conference centre in Pennsylvania.
The Earthcare Gathering was held from 25-27 September 2026 at Lancaster Meeting House, bringing together Quakers of all ages from across the country with a shared concern for the Earth and our role in it, and applying experimental simple, radical, spiritual approaches to the interconnected and catastrophic challenges of our time. Orienting ourselves around spirit-led Meeting for Worship for Business, we found ourselves gathered under a shared concern for the Earth, for ourselves and, through a sense of mycelial interconnectivity, for all life forms.
Friends have long been concerned about the criminal justice system at the political level, and about the personal state of prison inmates as chaplains. To me, concern for prisons as institutions seems equally important. An entry point for this, obvious but perhaps too seldom seen by Friends, is membership of an Independent Monitoring Board (IMB).
The theme of Prisons Week in England and Wales this year (11-17 October) is ‘All Are Invited’, after Matthew 22:1-14, where the servants were told to find guests ‘good and bad’. Quakers in Criminal Justice (QICJ) is appealing to Meetings to welcome former prisoners who have come to faith in just that way.
‘We are all the poorer for the crushing of one [soul], since the dimming of the light anywhere darkens us all’ Quaker faith & practice 23.09.
Tho’ the Eternal Wisdom, Sion’s King,
Be pleas’d to try his Babes, by Suffering;
Tho’ some departing from the Sinner’s way,
And walking Sion-ward, become a Prey;
Yea, tho’ through Tribulations Israel must
Enter the Promis’d Land, yet Heav’n is just,
And tenderly supports his patient Ones,
Altho’ he Chasten his Beloved Sons;
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