Douglas Knight

On May 31, Pope Benedict marked the 100th anniversary of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music with an Open Letter to its Chancellor, Cardinal Grocholweski. It was a timely reminder of how central music has been to our Catholic worship through the centuries, and once again the Pope reminded us of what the very sound of Catholic musical prayer should be.
“In giving priority to Gregorian chant and to classical liturgical music, the Catholic Church is not trying to limit anyone’s creativity but is showcasing a tradition of beautiful prayer”, Pope Benedict wrote.
In the letter, released by the Vatican, the Pope wrote that sometimes people have presented Gregorian chant and traditional church music as expressions “to be overcome or disregarded because they limited the freedom and creativity of the individual or community.”??But, he said, when people recognize that the liturgy does not belong to an individual or parish as much as it belongs to the church, then they begin to understand how, while some expressions of local culture are appropriate, priority should be given to expressions of the church’s universal culture. He said music used at Mass must convey a “sense of prayer, dignity and beauty, and should help the faithful enter into prayer — and should keep alive the tradition of Gregorian chant and polyphony.”
Unfortunately, the Church is presently awash with new music that isn’t good enough. We should be looking to the sacred treasury for inspiration. To that end a new and similar initiative in this country will come into being in September. The John Henry Newman Institute of Liturgical Music is being established at the Birmingham Oratory and Maryvale and will stress the importance of chant. The activities of the new Institute will also be put at the service of the Conferences of Bishops.??Benedict, and the new thrust in liturgical understanding, points us all to the chant. This is the best composition lesson anyone could give to aspiring liturgical composers. Those who ignore this advice have much less to contribute to the communal prayer life of the Church, and their influence will wane. More pressing is what ordinary people can sing in liturgies which correspond with the Catholic paradigm. A new Graduale Parvum is being prepared for British Catholics. We are all used to seeing Entrance, Offertory and Communion Antiphons in our missals and weekly mass sheets, which are either mumbled perfunctorily or simply ignored. But these are the essential texts for our liturgies as they change from week to week, and day to day. They are meant to be sung. They are much more important and appropriate to our cyclic prayers than the largely protestant and frequently irrelevant hymns that are stuck on at the usual places during Mass. These antiphons are known as ‘the Propers’. I have discussed these with Catholics from time to time, even priests, who look at me blankly and seem to have no idea what they are.
James MacMillan 31st July 2011

Some of the rioters and looters are as young as eight or nine. I then listened to a spokesman for Manchester city council appealing to parents to ensure that their children are not on the streets tonight. Why can’t people see what is staring us all in the face? We are not up against merely feral children. We are up against feral parents. Of course the parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or they are helping themselves to the proceeds too.
The parents are the problem; as are, almost certainly, their parents and their parents too. Not that any of them necessarily even know who their parents, in the plural, are. For the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem, behind the total breakdown of any control or self-control amongst the rampaging gangs of children and teenagers who are rioting, burning, robbing, stealing, attacking and murdering, is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a fully committed, hands-on, there-every-day father.
As I have been writing for more than twenty years, a society that embraces mass fatherlessness is a society that is going off the edge of a cliff. There are whole areas of Britain (white as well as black) where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon; where serial generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transitory males by whom these girls and women have yet more children, and whose own daughters inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and utterly dysfunctional parenting.
The result is fatherless boys who are suffused by an existential rage and desperate psychic need, who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at the world around them. And all this is effectively condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the welfare state which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that welfare fatherlessness brings in its train.
Melanie Phillips Goodbye to the Enlightenment

Allan Carlson The Family Centered Economy

Alexander Chayanov’s emphasis on a farm’s sexual division of labor “turns marriage into a necessary condition of fully-fledged peasantship.” The family itself is a “work unit,” with family members fundamentally bonded to each other: husband and wife need each other to survive and prosper; and they, in turn, need children to prosper and survive. Shared labor in a common enterprise binds the family together. Mark Harrison summarizes: Peasant economy reproduces itself through the family. The family is the progenitor of the family life-cycle and of population growth. It is the owner of property. As such, it expresses the fact that the aim of production is household consumption.

Quoting Pitirim Sorokin

Now families are small, and their members are soon scattered…. The result is that the family home turns into a mere ‘overnight parking place’.

Quoting Wendell Berry

“We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility” that have been turned over to governments and corporations during the 20th Century and “put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods.”

Over the last century governments have believed it to be their job to promote economic efficiency. Efficiency is achieved by reducing costs, the chief of which is salaries and pensions, so we attempt to reduce the number of people we employ. But whether the nation is served well solely by efficiency of labour, with the resulting concentration of economic power, is an interesting question. The concentration of power is precisely the effect of every government intervention in industry. Reducing costs tends to mean externalising them, so that they are not borne by that industry itself, but by someone else, such as the nation as a whole at some later time. It may that alongside efficiency, a nation also needs a certain level of economic resilience for too much efficiency may leave us exposed as global economic conditions change.
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The British Government is right to make the austerity effort – even if it is hopeless. But accepting the relatively generous debt forgiveness that might eventually attract, the gaping hole in Camerlot’s plans still remains the same as that of Tory economic strategy since Thatcher: no creativity in terms of marketing, diversification and self-sufficiency is being applied to the problem. With Conservative ministers, the problem as always is, they simply don’t get out enough.

The Cabinet watches an appalling traffic accident taking place in the eurozone, and continues to trot out drivel about our future being ‘inextricably linked’ to that disaster area. Is that the best they can offer? It looks on as banks spit in the face of entrepreneurial business risk, too scared to so much as mention the word regulation, when the rest of us are thinking more in terms of castration. It presides over a farming community on its uppers, when a major part of our problem is the enormous mountain of food we import…and a major part of our EU contribution involves the obscene feather-bedding of French agriculture. And above all, it fails to grasp the obvious reality of Britain’s plight: that our current economic balance and structure stands zero chance of ever employing, on a full-time basis, the citizens we have to support in this tiny island. (Disgracefully, it is backing away from immigration pledges, and bowing meekly to potty Leftist and CBI arguments about needing to import ‘trained’ labour while we have 2.4 million unemployed).
Since the latter part of the Victorian era, occupations in Britain have been wiped out one by one: domestic service, skilled tradesmen, miners, factory workers, farming, independent shopkeepers, roadsweepers, clerks, secretaries, soldiers, policemen, and a thousand other jobs: all have been sacrificed on the altar of mechanisation, multiple supermarkets, shareholder demands, DIY sheds, IT and – the worst cancer of all – the ridiculous aim that everyone must have a University degree, however useless.
Exacerbating this job shrinkage is the staggering trend towards full-time working women, nil-time working benefit cheats, and a tiny, electronically-driven banking community of some 50,000 adults driving over 60% of the economy. Who but a congenital idiot would imagine that Britain could support an adult population of a hundred times that number with an economy more suited to a ritzy suburb of Zurich?

John Ward Where Are The Ideas?

I have six children. I sat with them, read with them, worked with them, encouraged them, imparted wisdom to them, nurtured their intellects, fed their ambitions, opened their minds, instructed them in life, all its failures and successes. I conversed with them, poured over dictionaries with them, pointed and showed them the world around them, explained their rights and their responsibilities to them. I cared for them because I am their father, it is my job. If the State wants to assume all of the above, then 500,000 Fabians are the very WORST people to do it. All they have been taught is dependency, entitlement, compliancy, uniformity and slavery, the very WORST education a child can receive. My children deserved better. So I made sure they received it. They thrived in spite of the State, something we all need to learn. But don’t expect to be taught it by anyone employed by the State.

Old Holborn

There was a short but brutal drought in the East of England this year. It is over now, but from March to May, there was no rain, at all. But the problem is not so much that there wasn’t any rain, but that the condition of the soil means that it cannot hold onto winter rain and make it available to crops through dry months. This spring was particularly bad because we had had a dry winter, and this after last year’s dry spring. We will have to dig the field drains up, so that less winter rainfall runs into the ditches. Our field is protected only by its own hedges, so there is little shelter from the wind that blows across the much larger fields all around. The wind draws what moisture there is out of the soil, and the water level drops faster than our crops can grow roots to find it. We have planted a belt of trees round the whole field, but not many survived the drought.
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There are many pacts of mutual dependency, some good, some not so. Let’s have a look a couple that are not so good, and which are vaguely related. We’ll start with the global, then look at the local.
The Middle East supplies us with cheap oil. There is oil elsewhere in world, but it hasn’t come onto the market yet because it is too expensive for us to extract. Over many happy decades our industry, and our societies, have got used to this cheap oil. So used to it that it is now a question whether we could convert to the more expensive stuff, which is soon to be the only oil there is. Without oil, we are capable of no economic activity at all. The West is on a petroleum dole, which the Arabs (and Russians and Venezuelans) are kind enough to supply. So far, we do not resent being on this dole, and they do not resent supplying it.
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St Patrick’s Soho Square is re-opening after 14 months of renovation work

Tuesday 31st May 2011 6pm Mass
The Principal Celebrant will be His Grace the Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols. The Mass will include the premiere of a choral work by James MacMillan.

Wednesday 1st June 2011 6pm First Vespers of the Ascension
presided over by the Right Reverend James Conley, Auxiliary Bishop of Denver followed by a private, invitation-only address from the noted American scholar Prof George Weigel on ‘Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the West’

Thursday 2nd June 2011 6pm Solemn Mass of The Ascension
celebrated by His Eminence Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney

See you there

Credit at very low rates of interest is treated as “free money,” for that’s what it is in essence. Recipients of free money quickly become dependent on that flow of credit to pay their expenses, which magically rise in tandem with the access to free money. Thus when access to free money is suddenly withdrawn, the recipient experiences the same painful withdrawal symptoms as a drug addict who goes cold turkey.
Free money soon flows to malinvestments as fiscally sound investments are quickly cornered by State-cartel partnerships and favored quasi-monopolies. The misallocation of capital is masked by the asset bubble which inevitably results from massive quantities of free money seeking a speculative return… credit-poor economies are suddenly offered unlimited credit at very low or even negative interest rates. It is “an offer that’s too good to refuse” and the resultant explosion of private credit feeds what appears to be a “virtuous cycle” of rampant consumption and rapidly rising assets such as equities, land and housing…everyone and his sister can suddenly afford to speculate in housing, stocks, commodities, etc., and to live a consumption-based lifestyle that was once the exclusive preserve of State Elites… the addictive substance is credit and the speculative and consumerist fever it fosters.
The “too big to fail” Eurozone banks … could loan virtually unlimited sums to the weaker sovereign states or their proxies. This led to over-consumption by the importing States and staggering profits for the TBTF Eurozone banks. And all the while, the citizens enjoyed the consumerist paradise of borrow and spend today, and pay the debts tomorrow.
Tomorrow arrived, and now the capital foundation – housing and the crippled budgets of post-bubble Member States -has eroded to the point of mass insolvency.

Charles Hugh Smith Why the EU is doomed

The Coalition has been dealt some ghastly cards, and most of the short-term blame for the coming real austerity lies firmly with the bankers and New Labour over-spenders who put flash and news conference bollocks before real needs. But over the long-term, the lack of foresight about demographic trends (and the need to diversify our economy) have been pushed down the road by successive governments since the early 1970s. And of course, we cannot leave this subject without noting that the gold-pensioned Mandarins have given very little in the way of advice over that time. Arse-covering, vote-catching and mad greed have, together, hastened our arrival at this awful cliff-face. But the disaster will be ten times worse than it need be if the current Government doesn’t realise that this is a national emergency – one to make Dunkirk look like a gentle regatta. I could’ve delved far more deeply into the knock-on tidal wave of effects that will result from rising interest rates and growing national debt repayments; but after a while with statistics, a sort of snow-blindness kicks in.

John Ward What lies ahead

In recent weeks The Slog has been revealing the extent to which the many minions of Rupert Murdoch keep cropping up in the Hackgate saga, part of the long and complex corruption of the British political and media establishment. Strangely The Slog has also had difficulties with internet service providers, so goes offline for periods without good reason being given.

There’s so much going on at the Thomas More Institute
For example, Wednesday 6th April, Rt. Rev. Michael J. Nazir-Ali What has Christian Faith to Do with Essential Values?

Forthcoming at the Saint Augustine Institute

THE FUTURE OF MONEY

Edward Hadas Re-Setting Money

Edward Hadas is Associate Editor of the Financial Times Lex column. His Human Goods and Economic Evils: A Moral Approach to the Dismal Science is published by ISI. Here is a snippet from his Economics, Finance and the Good

The genius of the modern financial system is that it relies on and develops the human desire to work together for the common good but takes the human inability to be perfectly generous into account. For the system to work well, the rewards for sharing must be neither too small to entice or so large that greed is encouraged to grow. Further, unless those who labour within the financial system are carefully supervised, the large sums of money (representing large claims on resources) which pass through their hands will nourish the noxious forces of greed and recklessness.

I do not think the current financial crisis will destroy industrial economies. They are built on too firm a foundation of trust for that. The reconstruction of the financial economy can, however, be an opportunity for economists to make more room in their discipline for a pearl of great price – the good.

June 9th 2011

Paul Mills Time to give Gold a Chance? – What the Bible really says about money and debt

Paul Mills works as an economist for the IMF and is on the board of the Cambridge Papers, published by Jubilee Centre. His Should Christians support the Euro? is here and you can see him on video here and here

Both at 6.15pm on Thursdays at St Margaret Lothbury (map)

Here are the videos of the Conversion, Covenant, Hope and the Human Future hosted by the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem 13-14th Feb 2011. I appear in session 4 at 21.08. Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the power behind this project, appears in session 3, beginning 50 minutes in.

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, then you will live and increase and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

Yesterday (13 Feb 2011) was the sixth Sunday of Epiphany. Every Church of England, and every Roman Catholic, Christian will have heard this passage from Deuteronomy 30. It refers exclusively, to Israel, telling you that you are the people who entered this land and must possess it. But by extension it refers to you in the United States and every other place you live. This passage tells me who I am, for we Christians understand this promise for ourselves, discovering our inclusion on this entirely exclusive basis. So Christians in Britain have understood this to be our permission to form a sovereign nation under law and so to live well together. And on the basis of this faith, held by many generations over many centuries a culture has grown, and on the back of it, a law, a polity and a nation. This gospel has created a political culture that gives us the freedom of conscience, rule of law and conception of property that makes for a dynamic economy and prosperity.

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Conversion, Covenant and Hope in the human future: New Frontiers in Jewish and Christian Thought

Van Leer Institute Jerusalem 13-14 February 2011

Is it desirable for gentiles to convert to Judaism? Is there a place for Christianity and Christians in the covenant between God and the Jewish people? On what basis can Jews and Christians hope for a better future between them and for the world?

This International Conference is co-sponsored by The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the Institute for Theological Inquiry (ITI) of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation (CJCUC) in Efrat. It centers around the original research project of ITI scholars on the topics of “Covenant, Mission and Relation to the Other” and “Hope and Responsibility for the Human Future.” As the capital of the Jewish people, the birthplace of Christianity and the locus of so much international religious conflict, Jerusalem is the ideal venue for discussions of conversion, interreligious relations and hope for the future of civilization.

Apparently we are going to be live-streamed to the world. So if you have any questions about civilisation or about the human future, just ask.

Despite daily streams of data and calculation showing that banks are undercapitalised and overlent, the stock markets are ludicrously overvalued and gold undervalued, nobody in authority has any new ideas at all – and those out of favour are dismissed and/or smeared – the choo-choo train of it is alright it is alright it is alright chuffs along on its journey across the detonating bridge…
Which brings me to the final reason: culture. Just about every cultural fault that could get in the way of reform is present at every level of this unholy mess. A banking culture driven by selfish greed and testosterone. An economic culture with so few ideas, it invented the jobless recovery. A consumer culture ready and willing to accept the irresponsible credit sold to it in return for material benefits. A media culture more interested in bread and circuses than issues, and too lazy to look beyond the spin of briefing packs. An energy exploration culture devoid of ethics, and prepared to do any deal with any rogue on behalf of the shareholders. And a political culture in every one of the States involved that long ago stopped listening to the complaints, needs and aspirations of its citizens.
John Ward The Slog

Other financial commentators I am reading are Jesse, Automatic Earth, Zero Hedge, Mish Shedlock, Gonzalo Lira, Charles Hugh Smith, Naked Capitalism, and Alasdair Macleod

Here’s the gist of Saving Time – the Economic Consequences of Hurry

Bad theology comes from the bad conscience of one generation in the West which has determined to separate itself from its own sources in its inherited culture, and to grasp the present so that no unknown or new thing may ever interrupt it. This bad theology generates the agendas which control an increasing proportion of our national economic product. The fear that as individuals we cannot cope with the responsibility for our own public action and economic relationships, and contrive agendas that delegate this responsibility onto the state institutions from which a large proportion of the population receives their identity and income. This secularist theology can load new burdens on the economy, and it can pay for them for a while by asset-stripping that culture, but it cannot support an open public square or healthy economy for its has no resources of its own.
Good, Christian, theology creates a culture in which we are open to other people and to new encounters with what we cannot control or know in advance, in which we concede our own transience, identify ourselves with those who will come after us and we get on with making the investments that will give them the same hope of prosperity we had.
A healthy economy is embedded within and driven by a healthy culture with a healthy public square. A society is healthy when the current generation acknowledges its obligations to its own progenitors and its duty to its successors and so recognises its place in the transmission of life and does not attempt to out-live its welcome.
Christianity creates secularity (wide tolerance) and cultural confidence. Left to itself, secularity tends to become ideological secularism (tolerance narrowing towards conformity and centralisation). Secularity remains secular only when the public square can receive the contribution of Christianity

The full version is at Scribd and there is more at the Saint Augustine Institute

Next Economy Working Group Events

March 10th Edward Hadas Re-Setting Money
May 5th
June 6th Paul Mills Give Gold a Chance? – What the Bible really says about money and debt

The persecution of Pakistani Christian villager Asia Bibi has also been making global headlines. Her death sentence passed on 8th November at Sheikhupura District Court near Lahore, Punjab, for supposedly critcising Islam’s Prophet raised the profile of the issue; the subsequent demonstrations against her and the 4th January assassination of her high-profile supporter Punjab governor Salman Taseer transformed it into a national flashpoint and a dramatic indicator of the advance of medieval Islamic fundamentalism into the mainstream heart and psyche of Pakistan society.
It seems Asia is a committed believer. Reports tell of her faith in Jesus that is strengthening her through her ordeal, and I’m interested that it was her rejected offer of a cup of water to her Muslim fellow villagers that started the original incident. Offering someone a drink in the face of their hostility, like turning the other cheek, is true New Testament behaviour (Romans 12:20).
The sight of hate-fuelled Imams and Muslim mobs baying for Asia’s blood on the streets of Lahore and elsewhere while she sits alone in her prison cell with her Jesus reminds me of the best-known psalm: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want… Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for You are with me. You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies… Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life. (Psalm 23: 1,4,5,6)
The mobs can chant all they want; they simply demonstrate their tortured and intolerant Islamic spirit. Asia on the other hand shows quiet Christian resolution in the face of injustice and persecution.

Alan Craig Asia Bibi is My Sister

‘Economy’ means management and nothing more; and it is generally applied to the affairs of a house and family, which affairs are an object of the greatest importance, whether as relating to individuals or to a nation. A nation is made powerful and to be honoured in the world not so much by the number of its people as by the ability and characteristics of that people; and the ability and character of a people depend, in great measure, upon the economy of the several families, which, all taken together, make up the nation.
The man who by his own and his family’s labour, can provide a sufficiency of food and raiment, and a comfortable dwelling-place, is not a poor man….
But it is necessary to the very existence of a people, that nine out of ten should live wholly by the sweat of their brow; and is it not degrading to human nature, that all nine-tenths should be called ‘poor’; and what is worse, call themselves poor and be contented in that degraded state? The laws, the economy or management, of a state may be such as to render it impossible for the labourer, however skilful and industrious, to maintain his family in health and decency; and such has, for many years past, been the management of the affairs of this once truly great and happy land.

William Cobbett Cottage Economy

Let’s start by asking about the causes of our present economic crisis and look at three long-term changes that might have something to do with it.

1. Finance and the real economy
First, is it basically a financial crisis or an economic one? Has the relationship between the financial services and the wider economy got out of balance? If so, why? It is the job of the banks to allocate capital to the rest of the economy. They have to get money to the place in which it can be most productively used. How successful is the banking industry at allocating capital to industries other than itself? The financial sector has been growing as a proportion of the economy, and has grown spectacularly over the last ten years. What is behind that? Surely it has not grown at the expense of other industries? Surely other industries have not receded as a result of the expansion of banking? What is cause and what effect in this relationship between the financial sector and the economy?
Then there is another thing. Debt with compound interest is a threat to individuals, corporations and to the long-term stability of the economy as a whole since demands for interest payments grow faster than the economy can. The curious thing is that this appeared to have been forgotten, and restrictions that every society must place on debt abandoned until very recently.

2. Older and more worried
A large population of 50-70 year olds is looking for places to put its savings, and can’t find enough places. Then individual members of this age-group realise that their savings won’t be enough to keep in them the style they were hoping for right to the end. They start to look for increasingly speculative ways of getting ahead of the crowd, so speculation becomes the norm. The children of the baby-boomers have been loaded with obligations because their own parents have been unwilling to adjust their expectations downwards.
The future is that a large dependent population is cared for by a smaller population, but the more that prospect emerges, the smaller the future population becomes as people find other things to do than have children. Can you even have a growing economy if you have a declining population?

3. Not as fiercely independent as we used to be
We have exporting our industries, and with them has gone some of the culture of work and sense of community that those old industries sustained. Work gives you confidence, perhaps enough of it to do that most public-spirited thing, settle down and start a family with someone, and then stick with them through thick and thin. If you give the children your undivided attention they have a good chance of becoming the dynamic creative economic agents of the future. As it creates more legislation the state inadvertently takes away individual responsibility and takes away the incentive to exercise it. There been a corresponding loss of willingness to start families and for partners to sustain their marriages in order to bring their children up and create that next generation of motivated economic agents. If you delegate too many of those responsibilities to the state, they and you have a good chance of slipping into a dependency culture without an easy way out. Oops.
Now we have been transferring liabilities to the state so fast that some nervous people wonder whether our government can continue to meet them. Can states go bankrupt too?
So there you are – three candidates for underlying cause of the crisis. These do not show that a financial storm blew up out of nowhere because some bankers got careless. They show that the emergence of the distended financial sector is the manifestation of an underlying crisis in inter-generational relationships and the culture that is supposed to encourage one generation to bring the next into existence. This inter-generational economics is the new wave. You heard it here first.

Christian responses
So much for causes of the crisis. The much more interesting part of this discussion is about the responses that Christians can make to it. Here are some hints:
1. Christians look forward to an alternative economy which they call the kingdom of God, though they could equally well call it the economy of God.
2. Modern economics makes it unnecessary for us to judge for ourselves, for we can delegate our responsibility. Ethics is over, for the market can make our decisions and if it can’t the state will take care of them for us.
3. But Christians operate a different account of human being in which no one can be stripped of responsibility. This can make life rather awkward, though also more rewarding.
4. Christians suggest that you can’t get to forgiveness without going through judgment. It looks as though we all have to be a little judgmental after all.
5. Christians pray Forgive us our trespasses. They are talking about their own trespasses, but maybe they are talking about other people’s trespasses as well. They are interceding for others. Maybe they are even bearing the punishment for others too. The secret of Christian economics is the Christian view of human being, and the secret of the Christian view of human being is Jesus Christ. The priestly and sacrificial work of Christ who, by removing our trespasses, paying our debts and taking down all obstacles to it, restores the functioning of the human economy. It is not primarily the free market that is on our side, nor even the modern welfare state. It is God who is on our side, and who, if asked, can give us the forgiveness, the resources and the new start we need.

If you are interested and in London, come along to this Saint Augustine Institute event on Friday 19th November –