2025 Swarthmore Lecture - A Testimony of Community by Emily Provance

In the 2025 Swarthmore 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. We have published a resource to accompany Emily’s lecture which includes a written version of the spoken lecture and all 92 minutes written as part of the lecture. You can find this on our website: www.woodbrooke.org.uk/swarthmore