To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one's own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty.

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.

Religion has always been a matter of community building; a matter of building precisely those relations of compassion, fellow feeling and - I dare to use the word - inclusion, which would otherwise be absent from our societies.

Christian teaching about sex is not a set of isolated prohibitions; it is an integral part of what the Bible has to say about living in such a way that our lives communicate the character of God.

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.

In spite of the haze of speculation, it is still something of a shock to find myself here, coming to terms with an enormous trust placed in my hands and with the inevitable sense of inadequacy that goes with that.

The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ's body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God's giving that God's self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.