QUAKER UNIVERSALIST GROUP NEWSLETTER OCTOBER 2024
QUG Annual Conference 2025
April 25th to 27th at High Leigh, Hertfordshire
Women’s spiritual voices
We have decided to return to High Leigh in 2025 and, following our conference earlier this year which had four male speakers, we will be concentrating next year on women. We will have women speakers and topics relating to women: there will be a wide range and we hope to include women in the Divine, women and Quakers, women talking about their own spirituality, how women think, women and art, and women’s activism and voices from different cultures.
We hope to open the conference to applications next month and we will send you a newsletter: you will be able to attend in person or online. So, in the meantime, please put the dates of April 25th – 27th 2025 in your diary.
CAN YOU HELP US? At present we do not have a conference applications secretary. If you are able to work with the Clerk of QUG to help carry out this important role please write to contact@qug.org.uk.
The following speakers have been booked so far:
Rhiannon Grant
Rhiannon is Woodbrooke’s Deputy Programme Leader for Research and Programme Coordinator for Modern Quaker Thought. Rhiannon’s work at Woodbrooke spans academic and practice-based approaches to Quakerism. She teaches in Woodbrooke’s short course program and supervises research and teaches postgraduate students within the Centre for Research in Quaker Studies. Outside Woodbrooke, she researches and writes about Quakers for both academic and general audiences.
Janet Monahan
Janet is a Quaker, a teacher, an academic and a thinker. She is currently writing up her doctoral research entitled Spiritually Aware Practice (SAP) in Education. At the conference she will be asking the question: do women and men think in the same way?
Dora Bek
Dorais a solution-focused therapist and Reiki practitioner. Her life has been defined by a life-long passion for learning. Her universalist spiritual quest evolves around continued philosophizing and asking what Fox’s faith and philosophy have in common with other ideas of transcendence, conscience, reason, truth and reality.
Georgina Wright
Georgina is a teacher, blogger, poet and novelist. She moved from London to live in the south of Spain. Fascinated by the wildlife of Spain, but saddened to see how such wonderful diversity of life is at risk, she began to write. Her novel The Call of the Wild Valley was published in 2023.
Frances Martin
Frances is a figurative artist and convenor of the Norwich 20 Group of professional artists. She will contribute to our themes of women, art and spirituality and share some of her work online. In 2023 Frances contributed to a major exhibition in Norwich churches on the world of Julian, the mystic and visionary, who wrote the first book in English 650 years ago. Julian wrote about her visions or pictures, sent to her from God because she wanted to understand life and what it means. Frances’ own spirituality is shown in her paintings illustrating Julian and her visions.
Monthly meeting for worship and sharing
Our meetings for worship and sharing continue by Zoom on the third Wednesday of each month.
Our next meeting will be on Wednesday November 20th at 7.00 p.m., when Stuart Prince will continue his description of his spiritual journey – including exploration of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, The Upanishads and The Bhagavad Gita.
And on December 18th David Spector from the USA will tell us how the dissolving of internal stress and the growth of impersonal peace and joy fit into his life as a Quaker (see https://www.nsrusa.org/home.php).
The meetings start at 7.00 p.m. The Zoom will open at 6.45 p.m. We send out reminders two or three days beforehand to everyone who has registered. If you do not have the joining instructions and would like them please send an email to contact@qug.org.uk
We are in the process of putting most of the previous Wednesday evening talks on our website. Do explore these at https://qug.org.uk/talk-transcripts/
Another recent addition to our website is a pamphlet called Lift Up the Stone. It was originally published in 2000 by the Friends Fellowship of Healing and we are grateful to them for allowing us to publish it. It was written by Mavis E. Timms and consists of Personal Reflections on some of the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. To access it please look at https://qug.org.uk/lift-up-the-stone-2/
Universalist October 2024 and February 2025
The October edition of our journal, Universalist, has been printed and is being sent to QUG members by post or email.
We are looking now for articles for the February 2025 edition – prose, poetry, reviews, etc. We welcome all articles of a universalist nature. Please send them to contact@qug.org.uk or reply to this email.
Although all articles will be welcome we are especially interested in articles related to the theme of our 2025 conference – Women’s spiritual voices.
Membership of the Quaker Universalist Group
As a QUG member you will be supporting our work through your annual subscription. You will receive two free copies per year of our journal, Universalist, which comes out in the spring and autumn. In the summer you will receive the QUG pamphlet which contains the written papers from our annual conference.
The annual rates for paper copies of the journal and pamphlet are £18 and for e-copies £12. If you have any questions please contact Glen Gates at 5 School Street, Church Lawford, Rugby CV23 9EE or by sending an email to gleng@qug.org.uk
New members
New members can request a membership form and a bank mandate form from Glen Gates (address as above). The forms are also available online at https://qug.org.uk/membership/
Renewal of membership
You will need to pay your annual subscription on the anniversary of when you joined.
Members who do not pay by standing order should renew their membership by bank transfer using these details:
TSB: The Quaker Universalist Group: Sort Code 30 97 35: Account number 00016421
Or you can send a cheque, payable to The Quaker Universalist Group, to:
Geoff Gates, 5 School Street, Church Lawford, Rugby CV23 9EE.
QUG Conference 2026
We are pleased to announce that we have already booked a venue for our 2026 annual conference – it will be at Launde Abbey in Leicestershire (see https://www.laundeabbey.org.uk/). We wanted to move further North in our 2026 conference, with two conferences in 2024-5 near London. The conference will be in person and online.
The topic will be in the area of Music in faiths and religions around the world and will be from April 17th to 19th 2026.
CAN YOU HELP US? If you would like to join the planning group for this conference and/or have any ideas for topics and speakers please contact Peter Varney at peterv@qug.org.uk.
Eleanor Nesbitt – Open to New Light
The Quaker Quicks series of books covers all aspects of Quakerism and we wish to draw attention to this recent addition to the series. It has been written by Eleanor Nesbitt, who has spoken at our QUG conferences, and who is Professor Emerita in Religions and Education at the University of Warwick. It was published by Christian Alternative Books in 2023 and is available from them and from bookshops, including the Friends House bookshop. Please look at https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/christian-alternative-books/our-books/quaker-quicks-open-new-light
The description on the back cover reads: ‘Open to New Light is not only for readers interested in exploring Quaker history and principles but also for anyone interested in different faiths and the relationships between them. The topics covered include Quakers’ historic interfaith encounters, as well as more recent engagements with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Jains, Sikhs, Baha’is, followers of indigenous religions and Humanists.’
Andrew Cowan
On Saturday 20th July many of us attended a moving memorial meeting for our Friend, Andrew Cowan, who did so much for QUG. The memorial meeting took place where Andrew was a Quaker member: the Rugby Friends Meeting House. Memories of Andrew are on a website at https://andrew-cowan.muchloved.com/. The pictures include Andrew and Sir Mark Tully at our QUG conference in 2012.
Contacting us, questions and unsubscribing
If you have any questions or wish to unsubscribe from this newsletter please reply directly or send an email to contact@qug.org.uk