Announcement
Editorial, December 27, 2012

Looking over the Christmas Newsletter editorials of our founder, Margaret Lawson (1919-2006) there were occasions when she considered winding-down the FoL during less active years. And indeed the same sense of stagnation has echoed not a few times since.
 
Our last annual newsletter was published in 2001, to be followed by a lull in which other Church-focused vegetarian groups offered a decisive outlet for the renewed energies of Christian activists in Britain. Over the past six years, the Frank and Mary Hoffman Family Foundation have kindly nurtured and meticulously presented a unique, backdrop project with an emphasis on spiritual advocacy of animals' interests in the UK. As well as replacing the basic FoL presence on the web since 1999, the revamped site has developed into a notable theological resource which reveals a substantial record of much wider, non-secular animal rights activity in Britain, since the early 1970s. 
 
Now the time has again arrived when it is only honest to take stock of the way in which a venture such as the Fellowship of Life presents itself. It is all too easy for kindred societies (or concepts) to collectively project false fabric around a movement which in reality has the barest 'campaigning' presence in the religious world today. We have an important message to deliver in itself without masquerading as 'movers and shakers' when the opposite is often the case - lets' s face it!
 
Should there arise adequate activist momentum to allow the FoL to resume regular internet representation then the website could rightfully confer the character of an actively campaigning body. In the meantime, please make use of our printable literature and look out for occasional updates to the compilations of pertinent articles, letters, reviews and interviews, selected from Christian and animal rights publications of recent decades. Many of these previously published messages contain profound insights which could easily inform the spiritual strand that exists throughout the Christian churches; if harnessed and tactfully presented to future minds and hearts. 
 
Our thanks remain due to the Mary T. and Frank L. Hoffman Family Foundation for hosting, preserving and transmitting a substantial portion of theological animal rights heritage from the UK.
 
John Gilheany
Fellowship of Life website editor (2006-2012)

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