Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible.

A survey carried out across the U.S. between 2004 and 2006 showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers are more likely to give money to charity.

I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.

Giving is what makes a nation great.

The royals - all of them, especially Prince Philip and Prince Charles - have done outstanding work with the faith communities.

Sometimes the sight of someone in one faith wrestling with that faith can empower you to wrestle with another faith. For me, it was reading about how the Catholic Church wrestled with itself in the 1960s. Pope John XXIII set Nostra Aetate - the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions - in motion. It changed the relationship between Jews and Catholics. Today, Jews and Catholics meet as friends. If you can do that, after the longest history of hatred the world has known, that empowers you as a Jew or a Muslim to wrestle with your faith.

In an ecology of love, people can relate in trust and face the future without fear. They do not need to play it safe. They can take uncertainty in their stride.