Gloucester Quakers win award Quakers in Gloucester have been given a double boost recently as they have celebrated the reopening of their meeting house and the city’s Gay and Lesbian Community has named them as their “person of the yearâ€. Gloucester Quakers’ 19th century meeting house was gutted by fire in 09/2012 after an arson…
Quakers are making their annual nominations for the Nobel peace prize. Quakers can make a nomination to the Oslo Committee that awards the prize because they were awarded the prize themselves in 1947. The formal nomination is made by the American Friends Service Committee and British Friends are encouraged to join in the process by…
“Someone can’t forgive with a broken heart. We need first to heal our wounds…Then start the work of peace and reconciliation.†So says Cécile Nyiramana, a peacebuilder from Rwanda at the British Quakers’ engaging exhibition This Light that Pushes Me. Cécile brought together the wives of victims of the Rwandan genocide to meet with the…
Quakers in Britain are urging governments to reject violence and find a peaceful solution to the crisis in Syria by adopting nonviolent tools for conflict resolution. Helen Drewery, general secretary of Quaker Peace & Social Witness, said today that “Quakers see war as wrong because we value every human being so highly that killing them…
Quakers have been recognised among the 100 most influential global actors in armed violence reduction in a new list published by Action on Armed Violence. Andrew Tomlinson and Jonathan Woolley, the directors of the Quaker United Nations Office in New York and Geneva, have been jointly named in the list, under the section of NGO…
“We are seeing a new generation, a generation that are not sitting quietly any more, a generation who are coming together to resist injustice. We are also seeing a generation that want to make informed decisions.†– Benard L Agona, field co-ordinator of Turning the Tide Programme in Kenya As Kenyans prepare to go to…
by Philip Austin Set up after a peace conference of Quakers in the North in 01/1913, the Northern Friends Peace Board (NFPB) has undertaken a variety of work with and for Northern Friends, supported by funding and representatives from throughout the North of Britain. When, a couple of years ago, NFPB members began to think…
The better angels of our nature by Stephen Pinker. Review by Stephen Cox This is a big book, addressing an enormous set of questions. Is war and violence inevitable? Is there a human nature and if there is, are we trapped by it? Has the bloody twentieth century shown that progress is a mirage? Pinker…
 The 1981 Swarthmore Lecture 1981 by Adam Curle, reviewed by John Hall. The Swarthmore Lectureship was “founded with a two-fold purpose: firstly, to interpret to the members of the Society of Friends their Message and Mission; and secondly, to bring before the public the spirit, the aims and the fundamental principles of the Friends.†Any…
 David Bucura is a Rwandan pastor and is clerk of the Africa Section of Friends World Committee for Consultation. Involved with many peace and reconciliation programmes, he has recently been appointed as part-time coordinator for Central Africa for the African Great Lakes Initiative. What is the role of the clerk of the Africa Section…