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Category - hope

  • 7 Feb 2012
    Charles Dickens: a writer for our Hard Times

    “Even the burial of his body in the Abbey was a species of theft when you come to think of it”. George Orwell's words came into my mind as I watched the ceremonies surrounding today's 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.

  • 6 Apr 2011
    Bad news, good news and the persistence of hope

    After more than two years working for an aid agency you would have thought I’d be used to bad news. But, do you know, the emphasis of CAFOD’s work is about the solution – the good stuff that can and will be done to make difficult situations better, to push against injustice, to offer people the tools to get themselves and their families further away from the red lines of poverty and abuse.

  • 1 Apr 2010
    Winning out over over distortion and violence

    Back in 2000 I was honoured to be part of a British and Irish churches' team supporting an interreligious peace delegation from Sri Lanka on a visit to build solidarity links here. One of the participants was Duleep de Chickera, now Anglican Bishop of Colombo. A remarkable man, his 2010 Easter message of hope has a resonance both within and beyond the particular tragedies of Sri Lanka.

  • 15 Jul 2009
    Optimism, suffering and artful hope

    Genuine hope is quite different from optimism or wishful thinking, says Simon Barrow. To understand it we need fresh eyes attuned to the artfulness of reality and the presence of love even in the midst of suffering.

  • 5 Jun 2008
    Moving religion from harm to healing

    Religion that binds others with condemnation and superstition is far from the heart of the Gospel, says Simon Barrow. The church needs to face its arguments and seek to be a place of healing if it is to rediscover its global role.

  • 27 May 2008
    Hearing hope through the babble

    Globalisation constructed as top-down control and the triumph of the powerful needs to be disrupted by a different and gentler logic, says Simon Barrow. But will we choose Pentecost or Babel?

  • 8 May 2008
    Land of hope and glory?

    The notion and shape of 'the land' means many things to many people, as the contradictory responses to this 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel are showing. Simon Barrow looks at the relationship between rootedness and aspiration.

  • 24 Mar 2008
    Accounting for the hope within

    Ekklesia's friends and associates are a varied bunch - Anabaptist, Catholic, Evangelical, liberal, Protestant, radical and more. Here Theo Hobson tells it like it is for him.

  • 20 Mar 2008
    Resurrection is no Easter conjuring trick

    The modern temptation is to dismiss resurrection as fantasy or reduce it to spiritualised sophistry, says Simon Barrow. The shape of the core Christian hope is both more substantial and more subtle than that.

  • 14 Mar 2008
    Being on the side of the crucified

    In a reflection on faith and human rights for Easter, Savi Hensman argues that issues of life and death and the question about whether Christians are on the side of the powerful or the powerless go to the heart of the Gospel story.