Reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news.
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Good morning.Like millions of others, I stayed up late on Saturday, watching the England men's team play Norway. It's actually the first live game I've watched this World Cup, and not just because time differences make for very late finishes. What attracted me was that I would be watching it in a crowded bar alongside several hundred of the Church of England's most committed members, bishops, vicars and lay people, gathered in York for the summer meeting of the General Synod. From the moment we roared out “God save the King”, with a raucous enthusiasm sufficient to send any self respecting choir leader running for cover, to the joyful air punching which greeted the final whistle, we were bound together in a common cause.Watching the match in York with my colleagues brought home to me that neither following Jesus nor following the England team are things I'm satisfied doing on my own. My faith is far more than a combination of private beliefs and personal moral practices. Yesterday morning, along with most of my fellow Synod members, or at least those of us who had recovered from the match, I attended the main Sunday Service in York Minster. The hymns we sang differed somewhat from the chants I hear on a Saturday afternoon, as a season ticket holder at Salford City's home fixtures, but both are an expression of a shared commitment and belonging. So, whilst there are plenty of churches whose services I could follow on line, some of them with Premier League quality preachers, the moment Covid restrictions were lifted, I was straight back in church. I need to be worshipping God as part of a congregation gathered physically together. That's where I belong. But gathering in church is not the end of the matter. The final prayers of the Church of England Holy Communion Service often include the plea, “Send us out in the power of your Spirit, to live and work to your praise and glory”. It's a powerful commissioning, one that underpins how Christian faith breaks out beyond the church doors, equipping us to serve both our communities and the whole creation. It's a reminder too that we are not simply sent on private missions, but to work together, tackling the inequalities and injustices so visible in the world around us. That, for me, is a faith worth belonging to. A faith that needs to gather together.By Wednesday's semi-final, Synod will be over. I'll be with another of my tribes, in Parliament. And with all due respect to the other home nations, who are no longer contenders for the cup, I think Britain will be better governed if the palace authorities can match York University and find us a big screen, so we too can watch the game together.
Good Morning. The Government recently published its draft Bill to ban abusive conversion practices that aim to change someone sexual orientation or trans gender identity. Parliament will debate the detail, as it should. Laws matter. They define the standards by which we choose to live together and, at their best, they protect those who have too often been left vulnerable. Just a few days later, I found myself walking through central London at Pride as one of the Co-Leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism. It was the first time our new Movement had marched together, and the first visible Jewish presence in the parade since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. The new law and Pride belong together. One asks what a society will protect, the other asks what kind of society we hope to become. After the parade, someone sent me a message. They wrote that, growing up as a gay Jew, they could never have imagined their rabbis marching at Pride. They said seeing rabbis there would make it easier for people to believe they don't have to choose between their faith and who they are. I've carried those words with me all week. As a student at rabbinic college, I had the privilege of being taught by Rabbi Lionel Blue, whose warm, wise voice became so familiar to generations of Radio 4 listeners through Thought for the Day. He was the first openly gay British rabbi. Long before inclusion became part of our public vocabulary, Lionel simply lived his life with humour, honesty and deep faith. In doing so, he quietly expanded people's imagination of who could speak with religious authority. Perhaps that is how change really happens. Laws matter because they protect people from harm. They draw a line around what a society will no longer tolerate. But communities have a different responsibility. The law tells us what is unacceptable. Communities show us what is possible. The Torah repeatedly tells us to “walk” in God's ways. Faith is not simply about believing the right things. It is about choosing where we stand and alongside whom we walk. That may be why Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, after marching for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King, that he felt as though he was “praying with my feet.” Sometimes our feet say something our words cannot. Perhaps somewhere on the streets of London last Saturday, someone looked up and saw something they had never imagined before: rabbis walking at Pride, openly and joyfully. If so, then perhaps they also caught a glimpse of something else. That while the law can protect us from harm, a community, at its best, can help us imagine a future in which we truly belong.
Good Morning. Last Wednesday I conducted Annabel's funeral. Diagnosed with cancer five years ago, Annabel took the attitude: ‘Whatever time I've got left, I'm going to use to make the world more beautiful.' I'm taking her resolve with me as we enter a bleak period in the Jewish year, three weeks of mourning, culminating in the Fast of the Ninth of Av. We remember the sacking of the Jerusalem Temple, the destruction of Jewish life across history, and all the destructiveness in our world today. I love people, animals, birds and trees. When I see how we kill each other and treat nature with contempt, how forests burn and waters are poisoned, my heart aches with fear and grief. That's when I remember Annabel, and the wonderful Matt Biggs of Gardener's Question Time. Looking out on a piece of wasteland during chemo, he redesigned it into a gorgeous garden so that others would find solace while having their infusions. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,' he said in his final broadcast, ‘but if it doesn't have one, make it!' He saw nature as God's home, and understood its healing powers. There's a rabbinic maxim: When your heart is broken, try to cling to creativity, not destruction. So many people do just that. There's Gabrielle, who breeds turtle doves, a lovely bird with rust-and-black wing feathers, almost extinct in Britain. She's inspired twenty-eight local farms to grow hedgerows with the seeds these doves need. Now hundreds are flying and nesting free. Across our faiths, EcoJudaism, Eco Church, Eco Sikh, Eco Mosque and Eco Temple, we're working together to plant and restore. It's the opposite of climate crisis denial, and we're doing it with love. Malini Mehra, of London Climate Action Week, which just ended, writes how ‘in the big story of climate, love is underrated…[T]hat's a mistake. People protect what they love. It's the single most powerful driver of action.' ‘I don't love only hedgehogs,' says Hugh Warwick, trustee of the British Hedgehog Society and author of A Prickly Affair. But you start with what you love. The love that drives us is fierce. It's deep love for people, nature, the whole interdependent community of life and above all for the children, to whom we're determined to leave a thriving, wonderful world. Destructiveness, taught the rabbis, comes from causeless hatred. It's causeless because it brings only more hate. Creativity comes from causeless love, love whose only purpose is to make the world more caring, just and beautiful.
With the re-emergence of Andy Burnham as a Westminster politician, people have become fascinated by his backstory. The most recent episode is his time as Mayor of Manchester – responsible not just for the city of Manchester but also towns like Bolton and Rochdale and Manchester's immediate neighbour, the City of Salford. One idea Burnham mentions frequently in connection with his time as Mayor is what he calls the politics of place – the idea that politics must concentrate on meeting local needs. One reason why I find this so fascinating is because of the years I spent studying and working in both Manchester and Salford. For some of the time I lived in Manchester, and the rest in a Salford tower block that used to appear in the opening credits of Coronation Street. Much of the old Salford I knew has gone. The docks have been turned into Salford Quays with the Lowry Centre there paying homage to the painter who made recording industrial Salford his personal vocation. Row upon row of houses have been lost and old communities with them. Some things stay the same, though. Poverty is still visible but in post-industrial Salford there are different employers. It's not only politicians but faith groups too who have to think about meeting local needs in conventional or different ways. Salford Roman Catholic Cathedral, where I used to worship on Sundays and has just reopened after a three year restoration, was built in the 1850s. It served a huge, mostly Irish, migrant community attracted to jobs in the north west. Catholic bishops then were criticised for being triumphalist as they were restored to Britain but Cardinal Wiseman riposted that all he wanted was to serve the poor, living in squalor, wretchedness and disease. Yet for all that the Catholic Church wanted to make buildings beautiful for God. There was a tension there between serving the poor and honouring God. Nowadays there's another tension as somewhere like Salford Cathedral seeks to work out its future role. Should it restore past glory or reinvent new ways of doing things? Churches have to do this to survive. There's a new, vital requirement to focus on safeguarding to protect children. At Salford, the cathedral continues to serve the poor but nowadays that means a foodbank. Now, as well as the traditional parishioners living alongside the cathedral there are more office workers . The cathedral still has Mass on Sunday but now there are daily lunch time services for the local workforce. It's a simple way of showing that even when life changes, churches and cathedrals can still find a way to inspire, welcome and console those who pass their doors – a kind of theology of place.
Good morning. If you've ever seen the musical ‘Godspell' – and yes, it's still in the repertoire for colleges and theatre companies round the world – you'll remember the catchy opening chorus: ‘Pre…ee, pare ye, the way of the Lord…' – I'm tempted but I'm not going to sing it – the point of the chorus is to accompany the arrival of John the Baptist, the herald, of Jesus. Today, the 24th June, the Church celebrates the birth of this extraordinary figure of Jewish history, who appears not only in the Gospels but in the writings of the first century Jewish historian, Josephus. John's birth is traditionally the 24th June, 6 months before Christmas, and it also comes just after the Summer Solstice – and that has symbolic meaning too, because John reportedly said of Jesus Christ. ‘He must increase but I must decrease'. However bright the sun is in today's sky and however long the day, we're on the way down to long nights and shorter days. John the Baptist is known as the forerunner, the one who, as the chorus insists, prepared the way of the Lord. Yet he did not see his hopes fulfilled, at least not in the way he expected. He was arrested by the local puppet King, Herod Antipas, and beheaded in prison in a macabre episode when Herod's niece, Salome, danced so fetchingly before Herod that he offered her any reward she would like – and she asked for the prophet's head on a platter. Yuk. Oscar Wilde wrote a one-act play about it, and I remember playing Salome's evil mother who had prompted the request. So John the forerunner, the herald, ended up disgraced, confused, betrayed – and was never quite sure whether Jesus was the one whose coming he had prophesied or whether it would turn out to be someone else. John's story makes me realise how little we understand the significance of our own lives. We're all part of a stream of history, we come and go, but the stream goes on. There's so much in society that tells us we can be who we like and achieve what we want, that our sole purpose is to maximise our own significance. The story of John comes as a corrective. We are not Messiahs, World Kings, or even as one world leader puts it, ‘Very Stable Geniuses'. Yet we all have some capacity for discernment. We can practise truthfulness and generosity and be humble before God and one another. What comes after us we cannot know but all of us we can hope and pray the days ahead will bring flourishing and peace to ourselves and our overheating planet.
Good morning, There's much discussion over flags and marches and what it means to be British at the moment. This has meant the legitimate concerns of some have led to my own legitimate concerns for my family's safety. As an immigrant and a visible ethnic minority in the town in which I live, I can feel a sense of dis-ease and fear about whether or not I'm welcome in the nation which I have called home my whole life. It's within this climate of hyper-vigilance that I boarded a local bus and braced myself for some racist words from one particular man – someone I had judged based on the colour of his skin. To me, he looked like the type of person who might not like me. I thought he might shout some abuse, or tell me to go back to where I came from. Instead he showed me kindness. He held my son's buggy for me as I struggled with mine and my kids' belongings, giving up his seat so we could sit down. I could have wept at the simple humanity of it. And the shame of me pre-emptively judging another based on a perceived difference. All around us we see evidence that our society is fractured and fragmented and polarised. The horror of the scenes in Northern Ireland, and the sadness as we remember MP Jo Cox's murder 10 years ago this week. We're told time and again that we have more in common than what divides us. But I wonder whether this suggests we need to find our commonality before feeling a shared humanity. Maybe it's recognising our difference and choosing decency, kindness, and even love despite those differences that we should value. The Christian tradition can help us here in the example of the early Church – people from many different backgrounds and cultural and religious traditions – came together, sharing everything they had, not because they were the same, but because of a commonality found outside their individual circumstances and characteristics. Their differences were the point. This week, I attended the Sandford St Martin awards honouring the best in religious broadcasting, where a special award went to the BBC's Pilgrimage. The show takes well-known figures in British life with different beliefs – the devoutly religious, the agnostic, and the vehemently atheist – on a journey towards sacred sites including Santiago de Compostela, Holy Island and the Vatican. Perhaps the show's beauty lies not in the pilgrims' sameness, but in their difference. The commonality is not in their beliefs, but in their shared purpose, getting through a gruelling journey; spiritual and personal transformation taking place along the way. I find this a beautiful metaphor for this moment in which we find ourselves - One which might help us to meet the challenges ahead of us, where we might see our differences, and choose kindness and togetherness, anyway.
The headline simply says: ‘All I have left is a burnt bag.' These are the words of a parent in a recent Sky News investigation. The report has identified the faces of most of the children and teachers who were killed in Iran when a US missile struck a primary school in Minab at the start of the US-Israel war in Iran. At the time, the world reacted with shock, leaders made statements, but then the cameras moved on, and another tragedy replaced the last. That these children never returned home was a reality lost in the politics of war. As we hopefully reach an agreement to end the conflict this week, the photos of these school children are a poignant reminder that while deaths are reported as numbers in the news headlines, behind every face is a name, behind every name is a family and behind every family is a world that changed forever when that child was killed. Whether it's news of a school shooting in America, children killed in war and conflict or the thousands dying from the slow tragedy of famine, I sometimes wonder whether too often children's deaths have become headlines we just ignore or scroll past – they are over there, far away, someone else's problem. Because we live in a time where tragedy can appear on our screens, compete for attention, and disappear within hours. But I think that if religious faith means anything it demands that we ask ourselves what happens to our own humanity when another person's suffering no longer moves us. Faith shouldn't make us complacent; it should make us care. If as Islamic thought tells us children are an amanah, a trust from God, the moral weight of this trust is that it can be broken not only by violence but also by silence. As adults, we don't own their future but we are responsible for protecting it. Seeing children as evidence of hope, the Indian poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore once said: ‘Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of humanity.' Perhaps that's the hope we can all hold onto, that however terrible war is, we don't reduce or dismiss the deaths of children to collateral damage. Good journalism can't explain everything but it can refuse to let everything be forgotten. And yes, at a time when so much of the news media is contested, this story shows us that the world depends on journalists to turn distance into attention and hopefully attention, at its best, into conscience.
A friend relates the stresses of getting up in the morning. Her child has stubbed a toe but is it broken, poor kid? Simultaneously, the radio on, there is news of bombs again in the Middle East. And then, another worry: the erratic weather and what that might mean for a shifting climate. On top of that again, a background of disturbed domestic politics. Where is that leading? A hotch-potch of anxieties mount up. My friend and I talked about how to handle these confused concerns, some smaller, some massive; some nearer, some afar. They crash in on us. Little wonder that some people become politically frazzled or mentally fatigued – or over-stimulated or drop out altogether. The wisdom traditions offer advice on how to deal with such turbulence. A label often given to this advice is non-attachment. The idea is not to not care. But rather to learn a skilfulness in how you care. Jesus was one figure who taught as much, captured in sayings such as: “Give no thought for the morrow.” To be preoccupied with what might happen, or how things might go, is paralysing. And freezing in the present moment, or conversely over-reacting, is a disaster because the present moment is the only one to which you can respond well. The advice continues with caring for the soul, or how we are in the world, which effects how we act in the world. Or to put it another way: tend to the jostling facets of ourselves, what might be called our temperamental inner community. That internal unrest shapes our interactions with the wider community that exists around and about us. How we are inside will much effect how we are in the outside world. Cultivating a non-attached attention also opens up awareness of something spiritual. Staying with what is present is an admission that there are many things that we cannot control and, crucially, that we will let them be. This is not a failure but the gaining of a wider perspective. And then, it is possible to see that the modest good we can do is part of a wider good, which can be called God. There is a mental cost to feeling trapped in myriad troubles, but there is a spiritual liberty to find. Care with our attention brings that freedom – which is what I found with my friend. Her child with the stubbed toe was OK. The wider world certainly knows suffering, but there is also a goodness in the world that we can find and amplify.
Good morning. For followers of football, this is an important day. The FIFA men's World Cup begins, and all around the world, fans are preparing themselves to cheer on their favourite team. Although the real stars of the competition are the talented players and their coaches, we should not underestimate the importance of supporters. Numerous pieces of research have shown that the presence of fans does have a positive impact on how well a team plays. So much so, in fact, that they're often called the twelfth player. This became particularly clear during covid when football matches were played without anyone else present. When this happened, the home team advantage melted away. Without a crowd in the stands to cheer them on, the footballers struggled to play their best. The sudden lack of the presence of supporters at games highlighted that fans really do make a difference to how teams play. Today, churches around the world celebrate the feast of St Barnabas. Born in Cyprus, he was originally called Joseph but was renamed Barnabas by the earliest Christians, a name which means ‘son of encouragement'. Stories in the Acts of the Apostles show that Barnabas dedicated his life to encouraging others. He was generous and supportive, brave and compassionate, so much so, in fact, that he is the patron saint of encouragement. This doesn't mean that Barnabas spent his life simply being nice to people. He was courageous. When the apostle Paul first converted, many other Christians were frightened of him and Barnabas stood up for him; but when Paul later fell out with John Mark, for abandoning his missionary journey and returning to Jerusalem, Barnabas supported John Mark against the more powerful Paul. An encourager stands up for you when you need it most. Everyone needs encouragement. We all need people on our side, cheering us on and giving us hope, confidence and the strength to continue. The people who have been most important my life are not the ones who have, entirely correctly, pointed out the many things I've done wrong, but the ones who have given me the vision of who I could be and the things I could do. We need people to believe in us; it is what enables us to do our best. Over the next five weeks, whether you are a football fan or not, perhaps you can take a moment to pause and give thanks for the people who have been your biggest fans in life, and to remember that no matter what form it takes, encouragement really does make a difference.
Good morning. What would you do if you came across a man in a park, sitting in front of a typewriter, offering to write a poem with you? I would avoid eye contact and walk away as quickly as possible. After all, the offer might just be a ruse to rob me, or worse. And even if its genuine, I suspect the outcome of our poetic collaboration would be cringingly bad. But there is such a man in the park, and I have, on reflection, come to think he's doing a good thing. Patrick Kruse, a Master's student in Belfast, has set himself up in the city's botanic gardens, encouraging passersby to write poems – every day for the next year. Perfect strangers report being charmed and moved by the experience. AI offers something similar, of course. Feed it key words and it can spit out verses in any style you like. So, what's the difference? Most discussions about AI focus on its supposed capabilities. But another approach would be to ask what it means for us humans when we give up certain of our own capabilities so that AI can perform them instead. Pope Leo XIV recently published an encyclical warning against creating a technological “Tower of Babel”. He emphasized that human dignity does not derive from productivity, that no machine can replace “the grandeur of humanity” revealed in the human heart. It's very well said. Yet there is, it seems to me, much more that still needs to said; in particular, on how AI is changing the way human beings relate to language. One of the greatest minds and prose stylists of the 19th century, Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman described writing as a “thinking out into language”. Writing is not, he believed, simply a matter of expressing thoughts that are already in our heads. The act of writing is itself a form of thinking. As humans, we don't passively transcribe ideas into words on the page; we actively test, explore, refine, reimagine our ideas as we go. Writing is in that sense a unique and powerful tool not simply for communication, but for reasoning. Having machines write for us may be quicker, easier, slicker. But by outsourcing our struggles to find the right words, we also outsource the essential human struggle known as thinking. The new bard of Belfast's botanic gardens may not be producing high poetry, but his eccentric efforts are surely welcome in an age obsessed with efficiency and outcomes. It's good to be reminded that all of us have something worthwhile to say, including things we cannot fully know until we set our minds to dance with language.
Good morning. Economists, climate scientists and delegates are gathered in Paris to address what's called the polycrisis: climate breakdown, political extremism and rising social tension. They're considering taxes on billionaires, reductions in working hours, a change in diets and transfering investment from industry to education and health. Right now, attention is focusing on tech bros. Some believe a few geniuses will invent our way out of our multiple crises, and are entitled to the rewards. Others maintain only a flattening of wealth across our whole society will make life sustainable beyond this generation. It seems like a face-off between liberty and equality. What's seldom recognised is that these are originally theological notions. Liberty says we're fundamentally solitary creatures. Our well-being is for ourselves to determine; sin is a personal failure: repentance is a chance for individual renewal. It's an imposition for the state to inhibit that. By contrast equality says we're fundamentally collective beings. Our situation in life is profoundly shaped by the social, economic and psychological conditions around us; sin is about structural and systemic forces beyond our individual ability to withstand: by combining with one another we find power to address them. The state rightly steps in to assist and protect when we're struggling, and to catalyse and redistribute to make society fairer. There's plenty of support for both positions in the Bible and theology. But another thing that's often overlooked is how these rival perspectives shaped the most basic things about early Christianity. Women and slaves flocked to the first-century church because there they found dignity and security in the face of the predations of their masters. Early Christians shared material goods and supported the needy. These were significant practices of equality. But the church also called for individual conversion. It never forgot the centrality of personal relationships and discipline. Most tangibly, it created a weekly event in which each person, based on their individual income and material affluence, brought their respective gift to a common table; whereupon a priest described the personal and social transformation made possible by Christ; after which everyone gathered ate and drank – but crucially, each received the same. Over the centuries this came to be called the eucharist or the mass, and was ritualised into an elaborate ceremony. But originally it was a vivid social practice that harmonised a focus on the individual in their gifts as well as their need for repentance, with the collective ideal that all could flourish and none need be left behind. To get through the polycrisis we're going to need all the wisdom we can get. But sometimes that wisdom lies in the past, not just the future.
Good morning. One of the clichés of the media industry is that the public have a ‘right to know' especially when things go wrong. It's often true. Think of the post office scandal or the recent investigations into some of our privatised water companies. It's important for the public to know when rules are being broken and when there's manifest injustice. But the right to know must be balanced by prudence. On issues of security or defence, or when vital decisions are waiting, secrecy can be important. The whole point of a democratic system is that it's for us to choose who we trust, who we allow to keep secrets on our behalf. And all this is fine of course, until it goes wrong. In recent days many files relating to Peter Mandelson have been made public. We've learnt of indiscreet remarks between him and the then Work and Pensions Secretary, Pat McFadden. There are scathing comments about the Prime Minister and other leading politicians which were never meant to see the light of day, and come across now as disloyal. Reading them I can't help but suspect part of this was simply letting off steam. Politicians have a right, as we all do, to trust that casual remarks sometimes made in frustration won't go any further. But of course they sometimes do and in the days of smart phones this trust is coming to seem naïve. Perhaps these days we could reflect that Jesus' prophecy: ‘What you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in an inner chamber will be proclaimed on the housetops'. This is very challenging. Who hasn't said something disparaging behind someone's back and then interacted with them as if they'd never spoken? Hypocrisy is part of the human condition. And Jesus himself warns against it. ‘Let your yea be yea and your no be no'. That leaves it up to us to make judgments about who we trust and why, who we can safely let off steam to and who it is better to avoid. The public's right to know has to be balanced by common sense, because in the case of secrecy, context is all: another journalistic cliché of course. But it's true. And perhaps we should extend our sympathy to those who carry the burden of secrecy on our behalf. Not everything is a plot. Not everything said in private actually matters that much, though its exposure can be deeply embarrassing. Jesus told his disciples to be innocent as doves but I don't think he was telling them to take everything at face value. In the same sentence he had advised them to be as wise as serpents.
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