In her lecture Emily engaged with the challenge of how people can live and cooperate in community, especially when those communities are not ones that we have chosen. Emily presented a testimony of community drawn from books of discipline used across Friends’ theological spectrum and in many parts of our global community. In her lecture Emily offered a “sense of the meeting,” using the collective wisdom of our immensely diverse Society to suggest how all people, Quaker and not, can survive and thrive as an immensely diverse humankind.
Read more about Emily’s Lecture here.
Emily’s lecture took place as part of Britain Yearly Meeting 2025 on Saturday 24 May. You can watch or listen the full recording of the lecture here:
Resources
We have published a resource to accompany Emily’s lecture. This includes an introduction which is a written version of the spoken lecture and all 92 of the minutes written as part of the lecture. You can download a pdf using the links below, there are two versions optimised for you to print on different paper sizes – A4 and US letter size. Please download the version you wish.
Interview with Emily Provance
Get to know the 2025 Swarthmore Lecturer, Emily Provance, in conversation with Aled Vernon-Rees, Woodbrooke’s Communications Officer.
Tracing The Threads of Quaker Community
Read Emily’s blog post which shares insights from the research behind her Lecture, drawing on Quaker texts from across traditions to explore how we live and thrive in community.
