Overview: Quaker Quicks - Open to New Light discover Quakers’ ways of engaging with other communities and their faiths over the past nearly 400 years.

Verdict: 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.

Taking it from the top, Quakers have acknowledged the existence and significance of other faiths from the start. George Fox quoted from the Qur’an in writing to the King of Algiers about slavery. William Penn in 1682 spoke to the Native Americans, as an equal in their own language, of ‘the Great Spirit who made me and you’.

John Woolman a hundred years later, with the support of his Monthly and Quarterly Meetings, engaged with them in the same way, asking “…if haply I might receive some instruction from them….” (Quaker faith & practice 27.02) The Friends Foreign Mission Association (founded in 1868) reflected nineteenth century concerns to convert the ‘heathen’.

By 1928 the Association had become part of the new Friends Service Council which recognized how its witness had gradually evolved. Its former secretary Henry Hodgkin wrote in 1933, ‘I really find myself wanting to learn from people from whom I would previously have regarded as fit objects for my missionary zeal’ (Quaker faith & practice 27.07).

As so- called unprogrammed or silent tradition Friends, BYM should be aware that programmed Evangelical Friends in the USA actively continue to evangelize at home and abroad mainly in East Africa and Latin America.

As we are all well aware, Britain is now a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. Quakers are conscious of issues of faith and concerned for good relations within our communities. For some Friends the differences of belief, worship and culture between religions will be of a quite different order from ecumenical or inter-Church denominational differences in the UK.

Some Quakers have come to the Religious Society of Friends with an interest or connection to another faith, from their upbringing, family relationships, or personal searches for spiritual sustenance. Thus they be informed if they are to avoid naïvité, and engage respectfully with unfamiliar people’s lives.

Even at the level of neighbourliness each of us needs a basic grasp of etiquette – what behavior is likely to give offense and if possible a knowledge of the day by day and year round pattern of observances likely to be found.

What author Eleanor Nesbitt does here in Quaker Quicks: Open to New Light - Quakers and Other Faiths is reveal how the worlds faiths can, and have come together, have been able to already show what they have in common, and all in a mighty fine and highly accessible way.

All told in a readily consumable way, Nesbitt also brings forth personal revelations from her Friends on how they, in some small ways, have themselves been viewed by members of other various religions as having acclimatized to other religiously-driven ways re: merged identities.

About the Author - Eleanor Nesbitt is a member of Central England Area Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Professor Emerita (Religions and Education), University of Warwick. In 2003 she gave the Swarthmore (annual Quaker) Lecture Interfaith Pilgrims. She lives in Coventry, UK.

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