The concept of a "house of good" has been used to value the significant social and economic support generated by and through church buildings in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The report shows that each church is not just a house of God, but also a house of good, and recommends that the future be secured with adequate funding.

The study values the social impact that the UK's 40,300 church buildings have on society as at least £12.4 billion.

The report calls for church buildings to be designated as key places, recognising that they are "a ready-made network of responsive hubs that look after the care and wellbeing of the local community".

The government is urged to establish a new repair and maintenance fund for places of worship.

The overall message is that as society emerges from Covid-19, key places that look after the vulnerable need to be identified as part of a strategy to help society move forwards post-coronavirus. Churches also need to be provided with financial support.

The report suggests that the social impact of church buildings goes far beyond those who worship in them.

During the lockdown, some 89 per cent of churches continued providing local support, from online worship to delivering shopping to isolated people.

From food banks to credit unions, church buildings provide essential services for people in urgent need. They bring communities together and help them thrive, providing what the report calls a "social glue", the report says.

Church buildings house youth groups, drug and alcohol support clinics, after-school care and mental health counselling. They are described as, "a safety net that stops our most vulnerable people falling through the cracks". Continue reading

I remembered this warning when I heard about the fall of another famous icon, Brother Jean Vanier, the revered founder of L'Arche, an ecumenical community where disabled and able persons live in Christian fellowship.

Vanier, who died last year at the age of 90, has been credibly accused of an abusive sexual relationship with six non-disabled adult women to whom he was giving spiritual direction.

In other words, this was not just a one-night fling with someone met in a singles bar.

These were calculated and manipulative attacks on women under the guise of bringing them closer to God.

These accusations were investigated by an independent agency at the request of L'Arche's new leadership, which agreed with the findings and made them public.

Despite our anger, we should still congratulate L'Arche for its transparency. We must also thank the women who had the courage to come forward.

Vanier was once talked about as a possible recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, even canonization.

To discover that such a person was a fraud makes me angry.

Jean Vanier's actions were calculated and manipulative attacks on women under the guise of bringing them closer to God.

At the same time, I ask myself, why am I surprised?

History has taught us the flawed and sinful character of most famous men.

Some of the founding fathers fathered children with their slaves. History is full of bad popes, bishops and priests. European and American history is full of great leaders and thinkers who were anti-Semites and racists.

During my lifetime, John Kennedy and Thomas Merton had their affairs.

The "Me Too" movement has ripped away the curtain to expose men who are not the gentlemen they projected publicly.

Even the Scriptures describe people as flawed who played important roles in salvation history: Eve, Abraham, Moses, David and the Twelve.

It is nearly impossible to find an important figure in the Bible who is not also a sinner. In Mark's Gospel, nobody understands Jesus, not even his mother (Mark 3).

• Does that mean that we must discard everything these sinners did?
• Do we stop honouring Abraham because he pimped his wife to Pharaoh in exchange for livestock and slaves?
• Do we stop praying the psalms because David had Uriah killed so he could have his wife Bathsheba?
• Do we burn the books of Thomas Merton because he had an affair?
• Do we close down L'Arche because Vanier abused his position as a spiritual father?

The message of the Scriptures is not that these are holy men but that God can use flawed and sinful people to do great things.

We continue to see that throughout history and in our own time. Part of growing up is recognizing that our heroes have clay feet.

Forgiveness is something else

I can forgive Eve, the Twelve, Merton and sins of weakness, but I am not ready to forgive Abraham, David, Theodore McCarrick, Vanier, Harvey Weinstein and others who abused their power to prey on the vulnerable.

I will leave their forgiveness to God.

I am still angry because of the harm done to the people who were exploited by these men.

I am also angry because they have made me a cynic when it comes to great artists, politicians and religious leaders. It has gotten to the point where I even take Mother Teresa, Pope Francis and Big Bird with a grain of salt.

As a social scientist, I am never surprised by sin, corruption and conflict.

I am a firm believer in Original Sin, for which there is lots of empirical evidence, although I don't blame it on Eve and the apple.

For me, Original Sin is the reality that sins of the past provide fertile ground for sins in the present (think slavery and racism). And sins in our time will make it difficult for people to be good in the future (think global warming).

What surprises me is goodness, kindness and love, which are signs of God's grace in the world.

Many people turn away from God because they cannot resolve the problem of evil: How can there be a God when there is such evil in the world?

I have the opposite question.

Granted that we have been struggling to survive ever since we crawled out of the muck, evil does not surprise me.

I am surprised by the problem of good. Why is there good in the world?

Given where we came from and the world in which we live, why is there love?

Why is there self-sacrifice? These are miracles of grace. These are signs of the Holy Spirit, God's presence in the world.

It is the Holy Spirit that pushes us upward in our evolutionary journey beyond selfishness and sin to kindness and love.

So, if you, too, are angry and depressed by the failures of great men, if all these failures are turning you into a cynic, don't let sin blind you to the presence of grace in our world.

Be surprised by love.

• Thomas Reese SJ is a senior analyst at Religion News Service, and a former columnist at National Catholic Reporter, and a former editor-in-chief of the weekly Catholic magazine America. First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

But, of course, you know all of this unless you are more removed from civilization than, say, the Starks of Winterfell or the White Walkers who roam beyond the wall.

If you are clueless about all of this, devotees of Game of Thrones — and they are legion—might consider you as uncouth as a drunken Dothraki warrior.

But take heart because, if you are a faithful Christian, you are already engaged in a historical struggle ever so much the grander than any clash of dynasties.

Game of Thrones, the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's medieval fantasy series, is an epic dramatic struggle between the forces of good and evil.

To the credit of the show's eight seasons, it has often been difficult to know who was winning and who was not.

Sometimes it was a struggle to settle upon who was good and who was bad. At times you could only see who was bad and who was even worse. Circumstances shifted, and people changed.

The only constant was that the powerful oppressed the weak.

That remained true even when the weak became the powerful.

If this explains the television series to the culturally clueless, it also explains the Christian faith to the spiritually impoverished.

Game of Thrones is a terrific drama, played out in fictional history.

Christianity's core claim is that history itself is a great drama, an epic struggle between light and darkness.

You might not immediately learn this by asking the average believer to explain the Christian faith.

Instead, you are likely to listen to a list of teachings, called doctrines, which are to be believed without evidence, and moral precepts, which are to be observed solely on the authority of those who promulgate them.

Yet the core of the Christian faith is that good and evil are at war and have been for as far back as memory goes.

Scholars call this "salvation history," but ordinary people know it as the ongoing, daily struggle between right and wrong, one that surges around and within every human being.

Moreover, just as in Game of Thrones, in the real world it is hard to know who is what and which side is winning.

Good and evil are entwined in a violent vortex.

The sole constant is that the powerful continue to oppress the weak. Continue reading

Maybe.

"Turn it off," she said. "I can't watch."

My 11-year-old niece closed her eyes against the screen, blocking out the kids with no shoes, raincoats or lunch. My sister shrugged: "Don't pretend you can't see it. Do something."

For the next six months, my niece sold foot-rubs and baking. She charged her mother $2 for vacuum cleaning, and when she got $50 for her birthday, put the lot towards her KidsCan fund.

Last year, she transferred $150 to the charitable trust that helps children whose lives bear no resemblance to her own.

I have never been more astonished. Or, it turns out, ignorant.

In 2016, Volunteering Auckland registered 711 people aged between 10 and 19 years - a 60 per cent increase on its 2013 figures.

The youth cohort is now the organisation's third largest (the largest is 20-29-year-olds, those stereotypically self-absorbed millennials).

"I've been with Volunteering Auckland for 21 years," says general manager Cheryll Martin. "I've always known the other side of the story about young people. They are the most innovative, energetic, passionate resource for our community. But they want connections and a feeling of belonging.

"What I'm seeing, is they're not getting that personal connect from their devices. They're
actually starting to look up from their devices."

I was 32 when I got my first cellphone. My niece got her first at 12. Nobody under the age of 18 has lived in a world without Google and this is just-the-way-things-are. But what if teenagers want - and need - more?

The modern adolescent has never had more "friends". Conversely, they have never felt so isolated. Families are scattered, wealth is distributed unevenly and teenagers must compete to survive, let alone thrive.

Their world is changing hard and fast and they're following it live and as it happens. They know about the Syrian refugee crisis and the Paris terror attacks.

They know that, in December, a 12-year-old American girl live-streamed her suicide. And they knew, long before "Roastbusters" entered the parental vernacular, that there were teenagers who got drunk at parties and others who took out their phones and filmed what happened next.

What they're less clear about: how to make sense of all this. Continue reading

Sources

• NZ Herald, article by Kim Knight, a writer for NZME's Canvas and Weekend magazines.
• Image: Berkeley Office of Ethics

A couple of years ago, the idea of God came up, in an incidental way, in the Contemporary Moral Theory course I teach. I generally try not to reveal my particular beliefs and commitments too early in the semester, but since it was late in the course, I felt I could be open with the students about my lack of religious belief. I will never forget the horrified look on one student's face. ‘But Professor Jollimore,' he stammered, ‘how can you not believe in God? You teach ethics for a living!'

I shouldn't have been surprised by this reaction. But I always am. We were 12 weeks into a class that discussed a great variety of recent moral theories, none of which made the slightest reference to any sort of divine power or authority, but this made no difference. After 20 years of living in the US (I was born in Canada), I still tend to forget how many people here assume, simply as a matter of common sense, that the very idea of ‘secular ethics' is an abomination, a contradiction, or both.

I don't want to suggest that this attitude is influential only in the US. It is simply more prominent here. In polls and studies, a majority of Americans don't trust atheists and say they would not vote for a presidential candidate who did not believe in God. ‘Religion' and ‘theology' are still frequently cited in the American media as if they were the sole aspects of human existence responsible for matters of value. ‘We need science to tell us the way things are; we need religion to tell us the way things ought to be,' as people around here like to say. I have spent my career studying the way things ‘ought to be', outside of the scaffolding of any faith or religious tradition. No wonder I find such sentiments rather frustrating. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon Magazine
• Image: examiner.com

Saying a prayer may help calm anger and allow people to behave less aggressively towards those who have upset them, researchers say.

"Prayer gets people to view the world in a very kind and gentle way and reduces feelings of anger with empathy," said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University.

Prayer is a coping mechanism that can offer angered individuals perspective on the events that upset them, he said.

The effects of prayer did not depend on a person's own prayer life, church attendance or religious affiliation. Atheists did not participate.

Read more of Brad Bushman's research.