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.
‘Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee; and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of Life, which is its portion’ (Isaac Penington, 1661).
My father was born to secular Jewish parents in 1896. Recruited in 1914 like all his school mates, and later a lieutenant in the Bavarian horse artillery, he survived the horrific battle of the Somme. He began to reflect on the meaning of life – and death. Medical study followed. As a young paediatrician, driving through the forest in deep snow, visiting a sick child, he heard a voice, stopped his little two-seater car: Paul, go and be baptised.
On 2 May, Quaker Palestine Solidarity (QPS) hosted Makram Khoury-Machool, the founding director of the Cambridge Centre for Palestinian Studies, to address a lunchtime fringe event at Yearly Meeting. He brought a deeply personal and academic perspective to the crisis. A British Palestinian Christian academic born in Jaffa, he framed the issue not as religious conflict, but as a fundamental question of morality and justice.
Our theme was ‘Deepening our Spirituality’, and the sessions, activities and interest groups of Ireland Yearly Meeting (9-12 April) explored the connection between spirituality and creativity of all kinds.
It is difficult to recapture the full spiritual and intellectual excitement of a fascinating conference, like that of the Quaker Universalist Group (QUG) at Launde Abbey (and online). It took place in a remote corner of Leicestershire over the weekend of 17-19 April.
They reached the crest at last and saw
the wall and towers of the fabled city
gilt by the setting sun.
Friends might be surprised to realise the contribution they made to Britain’s changing post-world war two role, from victor in 1945 to post-imperial aid-providing metropolis. This was not an easy metamorphosis, and our national mindset still carries colonialist attitudes, but Britain was to emerge as a standard bearer of humanitarian aid. This was characterised by input from voluntary agencies, in which Friends played a full part. All this emerges in this new book, in which individual Friends in key roles are mentioned – though not always identified as Friends – as well as Quaker input to charities locally.
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Whether you are new to Quakerism or have been going to Meeting for years, you’ll find something here to inspire, inform and challenge you.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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