Review of Judith Roads, ed. Minute Book of the Monthly and Quarterly Meetings of Ratcliff Quakers, 1681-1701 (Cambridge: Mutual Academic, 2025), pp. 360. ISBN: 1916570135. Hardback, £10.99; free online access via: https://works.hcommons.org

Review of Zachary Moon, Goatwalking: A Quaker Pastoral Theology (Leiden: Brill Research Perspectives, 2021), pp. 60. ISBN: 9789004462090. Paperback, €84.00.

Book review: Carolina Fernandez Rodriguez, American Quaker Romances: Building the Myth of the White Christian Nation

Book review: Sally Jeffery, Dissenting Printers: The Intractable Men and Women of a Seventeenth-Century Quaker Press

2023 marked the 50th anniversary of Peace Studies – a discipline which has been closely connected with the Quaker community – at Bradford. Peace Studies as an academic centre of teaching and research at Bradford University was set up in 1973, starting its first postgraduate course in 1974 and welcoming its first undergraduate students the following year. It would not have been established without the determination of a group of Quakers to see such a centre in a UK university, and this Research Note looks primarily at the first 25 years and how the department came about and survived the many internal and external challenges. It also includes some personal reflections, as I joined the department 45 years ago and have retained a close connection through to the present. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

This research note focuses on how present-day British Quakers fit into theories of social accommodation that are seen as predictable for religious groups over time. Typically this has been cast in terms of move from a sectarian sensibility to a denominational one. Here I suggest, however, that in a highly secular society, the desire to accommodate can lead to a process of internal secularisation as an internal linguistic coherence becomes developed into linguistic assimilation with wider society. Examples of this possible re-expression of Quakerism are given along with ideas for how this theory might be more fully tested.

Although they almost certainly never heard of one another, Said Nursi and Rufus Jones were contemporaneous mystics and leaders of spiritual renewal in their respective Muslim and Quaker communities. A comparison of their writings reveals a high correspondence of thought on the spiritual life: a sense of awe, a sacramental view of life in which God is available to all and a democratisation of the mystical life. This in turn inspires a pluralistic appreciation of God’s mystical presence in other religious communities, even as one acknowledges the distinctive truth of one’s own. For each writer, this process opened a path to respond to the challenges of modernity in the early twentieth century.