The answer was that in Burundi, having a clean bill of health has taken on a very particular meaning: unless and until you have paid for your hospital treatment, you simply can't leave, you are in effect a captive.

How do we live in a way that shows an understanding that we genuinely live in a shared world, not one that simply belongs to us?

It's a moral question.

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.

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

Let's cut to the chase, the sharia controversy. I don't think I, or my colleagues, predicted just how enormous the reaction would be. I failed to find the right words. I succeeded in confusing people. I've made mistakes - that's probably one of them.

The world's creation has a beginning from the world's point of view, not from God's.