ABSTRACT
Bakhtin points up the importance of narrative, but narrative that is fundamentally co-authored. Bakhtin endeavoured over the course of several decades to develop, though rather unsystematically the concept of the dialogic to express and emphasize both the connectedness of what may appear to be individual narratives. In the first place, Bakhtin’s work is both anti-Hegelian and anti-determinist. An appreciation of his work does not predispose one to accept religion as a thing, as an external force which structures the way an individual acts and interacts with others. Dialogue’s drive to meaning does not lead to a Hegelian unity; in the Quaker meeting as in Bakhtin, there is no one meaning being striven for: ‘the world is a vast congeries of contested meanings, a heteroglossia so varied that no single term capable of unifying its diversifying energies is possible’. There are approximately 17,000 Quakers in Britain grouped into 500 Quaker Meetings.
