I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had the about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.

We can at least see that the question is asked, and asked on the basis of a clear recognition that there is no way of manipulating our environment that is without cost or consequence - and thus also of a recognition that we are inextricably bound up with the destiny of our world. There is no guarantee that the world we live in will "tolerate" us indefinitely if we prove ourselves unable to live within its constraints.

It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity.

Even when I was Archbishop of Wales and working with new bishops, I used to say, not realising quite how true it was, 'One of the things you will do as a bishop is disappoint people'.

In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation.

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.

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.