So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.

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.

Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor - but the Church is not a campaign.

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.

St Paul, in his second letter to Corinth, spells this out further in the important eighth and ninth chapters, where he urges some of the Christian communities to be generous to others so that they may also have the chance to be generous in return.

To conclude: good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context.

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.