A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.

Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society.

I do feel that federation, loose parallel processes, are less than we've got, less than we could have and, in the very long run, less than what God wants in the Church.

And when the world is created, it is created in such a way that those eternal objects of God's loving wisdom become actualities - interacting with one another, relating to God in the finite realm.

Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old.

We shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves.

Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.