{"id":1129,"date":"2021-04-28T18:20:42","date_gmt":"2021-04-28T18:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brooksidepress.org\/demo-43\/?page_id=273"},"modified":"2022-01-09T09:31:41","modified_gmt":"2022-01-09T09:31:41","slug":"sense-and-community","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/may-2021\/sense-and-community\/","title":{"rendered":"Sense and Community"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeanne Warren
\n<\/span><\/b>3 April 2021<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Photo by S.L.Granum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My eye was caught by the title of a comment piece by John Harris in The Guardian <\/i>of 29 March: \u2018How do we faithless people make sense of the past year?\u2019 He talked about the lack, in secular societies, of any community in which to talk about \u2018the profundities of life and death\u2019. He went on to consider how even social spaces such as libraries and parks have been disappearing or down-graded. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/div>\n

I wanted to join in this conversation so I wrote a short (unpublished) letter to the editor: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cJohn Harris says, \u2018For many of us, life without God has turned out to be life without fellowship and shared meaning\u2019 (29 March 2021). Our problem is that we have discarded not only the belief in a being called God, but also the belief that our connections with each other are as real as our individual selves. When we are isolated we feel lost. Religion was always about our communal life and trying to understand our place in the world. The Bible warns against making images of God, because the personal reality that is God is unbounded, extending beyond our understanding. Quakers as a religious community struggle with these questions in an open and honest way, seeking the spirit that will inspire the re-building of the kinds of community ties that John Harris talks about.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

I leave it to other Friends to agree or disagree with my characterisation of us, bearing in mind that it was aimed at a largely secular audience. <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Back to May 2021 Newsletter Main Page<\/a><\/p>\n

Forty-Three<\/em> Newsletter \u2022 Number 505 \u2022 May 2021
\n<\/strong>Oxford Friends Meeting
\n43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW<\/p>\n

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeanne Warren 3 April 2021 My eye was caught by the title of a comment piece by John Harris in The Guardian of 29 March: \u2018How do we faithless people make sense of the past year?\u2019 He talked about the lack, in secular societies, of any community in which to talk about \u2018the profundities of … Continue reading Sense and Community<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"parent":248,"menu_order":58,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1129","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1129"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1185,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1129\/revisions\/1185"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}