Reading Quaker faith & practice
We have written a calendar as a suggestion, a prompt, and an encouragement for individuals and groups to discover the richness to be found within Quaker faith & practice. There will be supporting materials in line with this calendar available through Being Friends Together, the online learning resource library that Woodbrooke runs with Quaker Life (available at https://together.woodbrooke.org.uk/resources.php). We suggest that you might like to use the calendar to guide your private reading and/or your meeting's study group.
There are two versions: a 19-month and a 16-week one, referred to as the 'long calendar' and the 'short calendar'. Both cover the whole book and can be started at any time.
The calendar includes every chapter in the book and some of the extra material. It puts more technical church government material alongside more personal and experiential material, and tries to give a manageable, varied, and sometimes surprising mixture of reading. It tries to balance the need to read the whole book in a reasonable period of time with an awareness of the other demands that communal and secular life place on Friends. For every month's suggested reading, we hope that you will ask these questions:
- how do I react to this material?
- what does this material, and my reaction to it, tell me about the history and development of Quakerism?
- what authority do I give to this text?
- how does this speak to me today?
- what spiritual benefits do I gain from reading and reflecting on this?