Reading Advices and Queries  By John Hall I was recently appointed Assistant Clerk to my local Meeting. One of the jobs is to arrange for a Friend to read an Advice or Query (A&Q – in the latest Book of Discipline they are lumped together) early in the Meetings for Worship that precede the local…
The Journal as Worship  by Jay Clark I owe a lot to a book called The Journal as Art, by Jennifer New, a book that reproduces pages from visual journals, alongside the creator’s comments on why and how they journal. When I was a teenager, bored of my written diaries that felt petty and uninspiring,…
Steps in a large room The 1985 Swarthmore Lecture by Christopher Holdsworth. Reviewed by Valerie Graves. It is about the Benedictine Rule. What have monks in common with Friends? Penn says a monastery can be within us. Background. Christopher Holdsworth was born into a Christian home: his mother was Anglican and his father a Quaker.…
Advices & Queries 17 by Keith Barber #17. “Do you respect that of God in everyone though it may be expressed in unfamiliar ways or be difficult to discern? Each of us has a particular experience of God and each must find the way to be true to it. When words are strange or disturbing…
Swimming against the tide A review of the Quakers in Criminal Justice (QICJ) conference – Woodbrooke 25-27/02/2011 by Ronan Falsey As someone who had only relatively recently started attending Quaker Meetings nine months ago, and as it was my first visit to Woodbrooke, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect! (Although, I had heard the…
Martina Weitsch of Quaker Council for European Affairs was interviewed on BBC Radio York on Sunday 06/03/2011. See the full transcript of Martina’s interview in this QCEA blogpost. Here is an extract of what Martina said: “York is a very important part of Quaker history, and Quaker present. I myself have lived in Yorkshire for some time…
The town of Saumur in France is set to celebrate its links to Quakers and particularly William Penn in fifth month of 2011, according to an entry in the calendar on the website of the Europe & Middle East Section of Friends World Committee for Consultation. Arthur Pritchard, writing a report of France Yearly Meeting in 2010…
Thomas Swain of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is due to appear on the BBC Radio 4 programme Soul Music on Tuesday 8th day of 3rd month at 1:30pm. It will be repeated on Saturday 12th day of 3rd month. It will be available for 7 days afterwards on BBC iplayer. Thomas was interviewed for the programme in 9th…
 “I haven’t bought any books for ten years. You can’t keep a bookcase in a doorway.†It is a few minutes before two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. I’m loitering by a church in central London, waiting for the volunteers from the Quaker Homeless Action mobile library to turn up and begin the afternoon shift.…
by Oliver Robertson If asked “Why am I a Quaker, how am I a Quaker?â€, this is what I can say. That when the answers to these two questions are the same and when I live out my Quaker values all the time and not just on Sunday morning, then I am all the better…