The Christian Gospel, which is a word meaning, ‘good news' - is that the Creator of all things, God, so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that all who believe in Him should not perish but have life now and eternally.

To put it another way, God who is Just provides salvation.

And what that means in practice, is a worldview that trusts the faithfulness of God.

At the same time, Christians live in a God-created community, the Church - and that is the rub.

The Church, being full of human beings, is full of those who go wrong.

The Church often seeks to speak truth to power, but we must recognise as different bits of the Church, and, speaking as the Church of England, our own power as well as our immense failures and sins.

And therefore, we should welcome the challenge and scrutiny from the media that is part of living in a democratic society. Having spent a good deal of my life travelling in places that don't have those freedoms, I know which I prefer.

When I started this job just over 10 years ago, the media landscape, even that short period ago looked different. It has become faster, more complex, more driven by social media.

In an age of misinformation, distraction, and the competition of noise with truth, it is ever more difficult for journalists to do their job. The best account of that I've heard recently was a series of podcasts by Jeremy Bowen, that some people may have seen - they make long journeys go very quickly!

My approach to the media has developed over 10 years.

I take more risks, deliberately rather than accidentally.

I try to engage, and I recognise the vital importance of seeking to communicate well what the Church is doing and what we actually care about.

I tried to say yes to as many media outlets as possible, especially the local and the regional.

I know how successful they are because they are deeply embedded in the community.

I have a very strong memory of a visit to a particular diocese in the province of Canterbury and being asked - did I enjoy travelling on buses, and what I thought about the bus timetable in that particular town?

They were certainly embedded in the community.

And they do marvellous things, especially at the local level, being immensely stretched and having had an incredibly hard time in the last 10 years.

I actually quite enjoy interviews, believe it or not, although they make me very nervous.

I could sit on the sidelines, and I'm very tempted to do so very often, knowing that when anything is said in public by anyone, it will be analysed and instrumentalised.

One of the relatively few things I'm looking forward to in my eventual and long distant retirement is being able to read the paper without worrying about whether I'll see my own name in any context at all.

There are two aspects to any religious figure's involvement in the media.

First, you're reported on - for example, after making a speech on the Illegal Migration Bill.

Secondly, there is the context of engaging with the media proactively and giving interviews or engaging on social media.

There's a difference.

So if we start off by engaging with the media, why do it?

The greatest single reason is that Christian faith claims truth.

For Christians, truth is not a concept, it is a person - Jesus, not an idea.

When in John, Chapter 14:1-6, one of Jesus's disciples expostulates with him when he says, you know where I'm going, and the disciple says to Jesus, I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about.

And Jesus replies, I am, the Way, the Truth and the Life.

When Pilate, at his trial says what is Truth?

He's asking the wrong question.

He should ask who is Truth - and Truth is standing before him, beaten and bloodied, and looking anything but impressive.

When I was interviewed by Alastair Campbell several years ago, we talked about his famous phrase ‘We don't do God'.

And we talked about the fact that even if New Labour didn't do God, God still does us and, for that matter, New Labour.

God's faithfulness and providence is an embracing worldview that is not a private hobby but a universal principle, recognised or not.

Terry Pratchett, whose books I found enormously amusing, has a book called ‘Small gods' and the size of the god depends on how many worshippers they have.

Well, it's clever and amusing, but it's false.

God does not need worshippers; people and creation need God.

If we take the Illegal Migration Bill, for example, I find myself reminded of the passage in Matthew 25:31-46, which is about the Last Judgement.

It concerns two groups of people who unknowingly live in a way that either honours or fails to honour God's commands for our way of life in the world.

It echoes what's often called the Nazareth manifesto.

In Luke chapter 4:16-21, these two groups of people, the sheep and the goats they're called, they either feed the hungry or fail to do so, they nurse the sick, they visit the prisoner, and as we think about the Illegal Migration Bill, they welcome the stranger - or they fail to do so.

The second group lived as though it didn't matter.

The first group is welcomed by Christ to eternal life.

The second group have to face the terrible consequences of living for their own interests, as though those in need did not matter.

Churches are active in this world and in its concerns because they see God being active in this world. And many of those people who call for our help are Christians.

Churches are over 2 billion strong in every country around the world, even the Anglican Communion spans about 80 or 85 million people across 165 countries. And the typical Anglican is a woman in her 30s in Sub Saharan Africa, likely living in an area of conflict or persecution who lives on less than $4 a day.

Anglicans live in the hills of Papua New Guinea or, they work in the streets of the City of London, or in the banks and the dealing rooms.

So when I talk about migration or about poverty, or conflict or trade or natural disaster, or climate change or social justice, it isn't a hobby or a way of filling the otherwise empty days.

When I talk about these things, I see in my mind's eye the people I know and love around the world.

The people I call brother and sister because we belong to the same family in Christ.

Being part of that changes everything. Religion isn't a bolt on to our lives.

It's not an app you can download into the human software.

It's the entire operating system.

It's the prism through which we see everything else.

And then this country may be becoming more secular or not, as the case may be.

The world as a whole is not, 80% of the world population is religious, and it's going up, not shrinking.

So when we talk about religion or religious people, we're not studying some endangered exotica under the microscope.

Of course, not all of that 80% are Christians, not even the majority.

And our relationship with other faiths is very important, as we saw at the Coronation.

We work closely with other faiths not just out of a deep sense of hospitality, which is arising from our understanding of the nature of God.

But also because other religious groups have a religious perspective that shapes how they see the world.

The Big Help Out, a volunteering initiative on the Monday after the Coronation, was endorsed by religious groups.

And you may have seen the images in the news: Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, and others of no faith and of other faiths got together.

It involved 7.2 million people in this country, well over 10% of the country.

It was a project started by the Together Coalition, which I chair, and on that day, Caroline and I served lunch together at a homeless charity.

Going back finally to what I said at the beginning, about 'good news'.

At the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops from around the world, which happened for the first time in 14 years last summer in Canterbury, I joined journalists who were covering it at a reception.

During that gathering, I said, yes of course we know there are stories about deep disagreements over sexuality that they would want to report on, and rightly so; they're important issues, and they are a good story.

But please remember that, at that gathering, I said there are people from war-torn countries and nations suffering from famine and drought, people who have literally just fled oppression and brutality, and people who have come from refugee camps.

Bishops represent the most vulnerable people in the world.

At the Lambeth Conference we talked extensively; we spent two hours on sexuality in 10 days, on everything else, slavery and justice, suffering.

But we chose to love one another despite our differences.

Please, in your reporting, don't forget the millions of people and the incredible stories that the Christian church and even the Church of England represent. Because I think that is also good news for all its faults, both for journalists and Christians.

So now, as I finish, I'd like to turn the tables and ask a couple of questions of you.

How do you communicate the worldview of religious people, as well as the fact in a way that just doesn't put their religion in a part of their lives?

And, can you help me through your questions and your comments, understand better, how we can communicate with you?

• Archbishop Justin Welby is Archbishop of Canterbury
• Speech delivered at Religion Media Festival

Their remarks surprised me. I am critical but I think it is healthy and responsible to be constructively critical.

Being critical, however, is not the same thing as being negative. And I am really not pessimistic.

But I am a clear-eyed realist and greatly concerned about the problems that confront present and future generations in our contemporary world.

This reflection does not focus on the problems. I call it the "Tenacity of Hope" because I am not a prophet of doom. And my faith and my reading of history give me hope and encouragement.

Yes very big problems confront us today: political and religious polarization, climate change, and, of course, a rebounding coronavirus.

If people work together, all of these problems can be resolved. I do believe that.

For some problems it may take a lot of time. For other problems like the pandemic, there will be yet more suffering and death before we can say we have safely moved beyond that.

One's life perspective is important

As an older historical theologian, I am also confident that there will be a greatly needed reconfiguration of our Christian Churches. But I am not certain I will live to see it.

Right now I enjoy witnessing what I call the new Church transformation movements, like those involving women priests.

And I find encouragement from truly well-informed contemporary theologians - like the men and women teaching and researching at the Catholic University of Leuven. They know the tradition and its history. They understand and know how to interpret today's signs of the times.

One's life perspective is important. I grew up with family stories about fear and hope.

In corona days I have thought a lot about my father, his four brothers and, of course, my grandmother.

My grandfather, Alonzo William Dick, a schoolteacher in Indiana, died in 1919 in the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918-1920. Most of his children as well as my grandmother were too sick to attend his funeral.

Town authorities in Montpelier, Indiana wanted to put the boys in foster care homes. My grandmother said, "Absolutely not."

She had a big challenge in front of her. Fortunately, there were neighbours and family members who encouraged and helped her, especially in the first couple of years after Alonzo's death.

It was not always easy but she raised the five boys on her own and they all became wonderfully mature, optimistic, warm and wise adults.

Their mother had often reminded them - and often reminded me as I was growing up — that "bad things do happen but we cannot allow them to destroy us".

Historical reminders that give us hope

Yes, my perspective and optimistic vision are historically based. I look at what happened in the past, what is happening today, and what can happen tomorrow.

These days I also find that my current Belgian environment is helpful when reflecting about tragedies and the tenacity of hope.

Although I was born and grew up in Michigan (USA), I now live in Leuven ("Louvain"). Many years ago I came here to complete a doctorate, was offered a job, and never left…But I am still very much a US American.

Historical reminders are all around my family and me. In our back yard, my wife and I can look at the area, not far from our house, where there was once the local community hanging-tree.

Soldiers of the fiercely anti-Protestant Duke of Alba, "The Iron Duke," used the hanging-tree in the sixteenth-century religious wars to execute citizens of Leuven suspected of Calvinist sympathies.

Alba, strongly supported by Pope Pius V (1566-1572), was governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1567 to 1573. During those six years, across the country, he executed more than a thousand people.

Nevertheless, Leuven not only survived.

It flourished because enough people maintained courage and hope. And the area of the local hanging-tree — which I am sure is unknown to most contemporary people — has been greatly transformed and is now quite safe and peaceful.

Life is stronger than death.

Hopeful people can pick up and move forward

Close to 350 years after the terrorism of the "Iron Duke," Leuven suffered again in World War I. Starting on August 25, 1914, and over the course of five days, German troops burned and looted much of the city and executed hundreds of civilians.

Our world-renowned university library with its magnificent collection of ancient manuscripts was burned. This provoked great national and international outrage.

Nevertheless, people did not give up and Leuven was rebuilt. And, starting in 1921, thanks to countless fundraisers (mainly Americans) and the personal efforts of Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), who was chairman of the Commission for Relief of Belgium, a new library could be built.

Then, just about thirty years later, the city was bombed in World War II. There was great devastation. Again, people picked up, rebuilt, and moved forward.

The tenacity of hope.

Hopeful people pick up and move forward. But thanks to the narrow-minded, and often belligerent behaviour of the anti-vaxxers, we are confronted with a major resurgence of the coronavirus.

So our contemporary challenges are very real.

I confess that I find it very easy to point my fingers at and write articles about problematic and negative people. I get annoyed and frustrated. But I know we need to work against polarization and I do try to reach out to the problematic and negative.

It is not easy. I have lost a lot of Facebook friends in the process.

Examples of hope-filled men and women

From the Apostle Paul, I know that "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful" (1 Cor 13: 4-5).

And I know as well that, in my dealings with negative and often obnoxious people, I do need to be humbly alert to the exhortation of Jesus in Matthew 7 and Luke 6: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

Thinking about strengthening our own tenacity of hope, we greatly need to learn from the examples of hope-filled men and women.

My old friend, Archbishop Jadot, the subject of my recent book, was for me a supportive teacher.

I remember complaining to him about problems in the church and my frustrations with problematic bishops. One US archbishop had tried very hard — but without success — to get me fired from the University of Leuven.

Jadot looked at me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said: "Yes it is winter now. But spring WILL return."

We all need people like Jean Jadot in our lives.

Actually, I guess we are all called to be prophets of hope and hopeful change. We need to critically examine our own perspectives because they can make us open or closed.

"Noble, generous and heroic"

A few days ago I met a very old fashioned-thinking young priest. His theology was medieval and his comportment was haughty and arrogant.

What a disappointment.

Then a couple of days later I met a group of energetic young men and women, who are theology students at our university. They are wonderfully bright, well informed; and their theological perspectives are contemporary and pastoral.

What a delight. What a healthy perspective.

These young people who are working on advanced theological degrees are, indeed, whether they realize it or not, prophets of hope and hopeful change for today and for tomorrow.

In a couple of weeks, one of my adult discussion groups will discuss an article about the English anthropologist Jane Goodall (b. 1934). She is a wonderfully prophetic and inspiring person.

I remember Reason for Hope, the book she wrote in 1999 with Phillip Berman. It details Goodall's spiritual epiphany and her belief that everyone can find a reason for hope.

"Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference," she wrote.

And she continued with these lines:

It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are also capable of the noblest, generous, and heroic behaviour.

The tenacity of hope.

With constructive criticism and collaborative efforts, we can indeed be "noble, generous, and heroic" in Church and in civil society.

• John Alonso Dick is a historical theologian and former academic dean at the American College, KU Leuven (Belgium) and professor the KU Leuven and the University of Ghent. His latest book is Jean Jadot: Paul's Man in Washington (Another Voice Publications, 2021).
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

"There's something very, very wrong when so many people who claim to be religious act as if they have to hide out, as if their understanding of things couldn't support daylight," Marilynne Robinson said Friday during the Trinity Forum livestream event, "Story, Culture, & the Common Good."

The event was the latest entry in the Trinity Forum's schedule of online events aimed at creating virtual spaces for engaging life's deep questions in a faith context during the pandemic.

Referencing the many times when she's been asked whether she was afraid to write about Christianity for a broader, secular audience, the novelist said, "I've had no problem with that, zero!"

"I think one of the strangest things that happens is that many people who consider themselves Christians consider themselves strangers in the world, in the sense that if people found out what they really thought or believed, they'd be ridiculed," she added.

Robinson's books make no attempt to disguise her love for and fluency with theology, which shows itself in the deeply religious lives of many of her characters, such as Gilead'sReverend John Ames.

Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her forthcoming novel, Jack, continues with the story of Ames' prodigal son, John Ames Broughton.

Unreasonable suspicions of interactions with the broader world, Robinson argued Friday, cause Christians to "restrict their own work, their own imaginations, because they're afraid."

Holding up her own career as a test of what happens when a Christian artist resists those fears, she said, "I think I have been as genuinely and fairly read and reviewed as any writer that I know."

Robinson also weighed in on the contours of a current cultural moment marked by the pandemic and a nationwide reckoning on racial injustice.

"I've never seen such crazy times in my life, but I do think the balance is probably on the side of the restoration of American democracy," Robinson said, adding that democracy is "the only way we can possibly honor the fact of the brilliance, the importance of every human life."

Conceding that "the government itself seems to be in pretty bad shape," the author said she sees signs in movements to combat racial injustice that the "populace seems to be in pretty good shape" and she believes "we have a good possibility of having it all work out."

"We're just living, in a kind of condensed form, human life … people have always had to deal with pandemics, plagues… people have always dealt with unrest," she said. "We're not habituated to it because we've been very fortunate, but that doesn't mean we're exempt from what people have lived through time out of mind."

Fear and a "tendency to condescend horribly to one another" have been destructive forces at a time that instead calls for a "discipline of generosity," the author said.

Humans have an "unlimited capacity for generosity," she explained. "That means that in any work you do at all - that certainly means any artistic work you do - we have that capacity to create society around us by acts of generosity towards the society, and of course the repayment of that sort of choice is very clear… you make the society you want to live in."

History, Robinson argued, could be providing models for moving society forward.

Too often, however, people are approaching history with either uncritical nostalgia - "that's when people were right-minded" - or blanket condescension - those who "existed with evil" must have been evil themselves. Continue reading

• The analysis or comments in this article do not necessarily reflect the view of CathNews.

The frequent value-add phrase from fast food outlets has been given a twist by Austrian deacon Willi Holzhammer who is making a special offer at his local supermarkets — free spiritual guidance and counselling when you pick up your groceries.

Holzhammer is touring the Alpine province of Tyrol each Saturday and setting up his service for shoppers.

The retired computer specialist already runs a page on social networking site Facebook where followers can "Ask Willi" for advice.

"Personal encounters are just another step," Holzhammer said in a press release from Catholic news agency Kathpress.

His supermarket service will run for five weeks and be held at different towns in the western province.

Sources

• Reuters
• Image: The Local
• KathWeb (Translation by Google)

So, for example, a dictator or the leader of a totalitarian state might argue that he has a right to constrain the lives of the citizens to fit the purposes which the dictator or the state may impose, but this too is based squarely on the assumption that, in the order of nature, the State is prior to the person, and that the purpose of the human person is to serve the ends of the State. Some may believe, of course, that the State is in the best position to determine what is good for the social order as a whole. But these fundamental assumptions about the nature and purposes of the human person must be in place for that belief to become operative.

Read "Human Judgment and the Neutral Public Square"